


Insides Outside

by lapsi



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017), Мор. Утопия | Pathologic
Genre: Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Murder, Murder Mystery, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Diurnal Ending (Pathologic), Suicidal Thoughts, if you are Russian and you read this: please forgive me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27501988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: Daniil Dankovsky, reduced to working as a mere pathologist, is summoned to an idiosyncratic port town to help hunt down the man suspected of a string of gruesome, ritualistic murders. Dankovsky quickly deduces that he was not selected by the Behaviorists for his medical expertise, but for his personal connection to the Ripper-- and, perhaps, his outlawed thanatological studies.
Comments: 93
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work is set within the universe of of Pathologic 2. While this is a crossover, this work should be accessible to those familiar with only Pathologic 2, and, unfortunately, inaccessible to those familiar with only Mindhunter. To anyone familiar with both: please be my friend.

There is nobody to greet the Bachelor at the train station.  
  
He removes the letter that hurried him out of the Clinical Hospital’s dingy basement pathology lab, then unfolds it. No miraculous new directions have inked themselves into existence since he last scrutinised the abstruse instructions. He forces the folded letter inside its tattering envelope, which he pockets resentfully; as miserable as the work poring over frothy, formaldehyde-cured lung damage and chemically-cauterized skin samples was, The Powers That Be summoning him afield hardly constituted a welcome reprieve. It came to his office door by courier, in the undeniable way that court summons, or news of dead family members would. Beneath the official seal, the letter had the decorum to suggest the job offer was voluntary; of course, this job offer is voluntary in the same sense that a mosquito voluntarily avoids a swatting hand. The Behaviourists request your assistance in an ongoing investigation-- be hasty, or see your own insides spread about you.  
  
The Bachelor sets down his suitcase to spare his shoulder while he waits, though he’s not sure for whom. The only souls in sight are a collection of disinterested, shabby lumber workers, filling his vacated train carriage with felled logs. That, at long last, explains the splinters he picked out almost every morning from his back and shoulders.  
  
The Department of Behaviorists were formulated in response to some civilian-perpetrated atrocity-- the University Torso Murders or the Ace of Diamonds Caravan Trial, perhaps, or some more recent carnage. Daniil takes no interest in the morbid furores that periodically occupy the public attention, nor the bloodhounds the Powers That Be bred into existence to hunt down more prolific murderers. The scant details he gleaned before departure led him to believe that the Behaviorists work in conjunction with Inquisitors; that makes them an inherent redundancy, if Aglaya Lilich’s deductive skills were representative. Perhaps they are failed Inquisitors, made use of much as one fills sausage casings with offcuts. Perhaps this is merely novel, facile terminology to disguise the continued repression of objectionable individuals under the guise of preventing crime. Regardless of what the Behaviorists truly are, they have far more authority than a lowly pathologist. Daniil barely entertained the prospect of resisting the summons, though perhaps if he’d known just how hellishly unreliable the overland train crossing would be, he’d have been more artful.  
  
Keeping cautiously close to his suitcase (he barely has the stomach to open the bag and examine the damage the long, jolting ride has inflicted on his encased microscope) and still gripping his over-full work bag, he squints towards the distant township and begins to weigh his options. The pockets of his slightly scuffed snakeskin coat feel terrifyingly light: there’s barely one serve of dried reindeer left, and he’s only less desperate for potable water by the slimmest of margins. He’s not sure how much of either he can currently afford, even if he locates a grocer. His train fares were waived by official papers, but food was costly in remote towns, as was accommodation when the trains inevitably ran late or broke down.  
  
To the left of him is the sky-mixed, hazy ocean-- he’s seen the ocean before, when he was very young, but unlike other childhood recollections it seems to have since grown, not shrunk-- and bordering the dead-end train track, a junk yard. Gargantuan shipping hulls slumber in various states of smeared, running corrosion. In clearer light, the shapes might be orange and identifiable; today, in the overcast afternoon, it is murky, liver-red trash. Continuing on from the aborted train tracks, a gravel road threatens a five or ten minute walk to even reach the outskirts of the port town, pinned beneath a menacing mountain.  
  
“Bachelor Dankovsky?” The rolling shutter of a small ticket office at the other end of the platform has opened.  
  
“Yes,” Dankovsky answers, huffing with relief as he jogs over.  
  
“You’re late,” says the uniformed, scrawny woman.  
  
“...for what?”  
  
“I was instructed to deliver a note to you this morning.”  
  
The Bachelor grows testy. “There is only one weekly train, and you observed it arrive at the station not two minutes ago. Should I have taken off ahead on foot and sought to outstrip it?”  
  
She retreats from the narrow ticket window in hostile silence. Daniil briefly regrets his curt (but appropriate) response, until she reappears and slides an envelope across the counter.  
  
Daniil sets down his suitcase, tears through the top with his finger, and unfolds the crisp, bright paper within.  
  
_‘Welcome to the Easternmost Port, Doctor Dankovsky,  
  
Your accommodation is at Property 87 Upper Pritchel. It has been stocked for your arrival. A key is concealed in the wooden carving over the doorway. Please make your way to the Town Hall once you are settled.  
  
Agent Fyordorov’ _

The note is mechanically worded, mechanically typed (including the sign off, which constitutes a significant faux pas-- not that Dakovsky plans on reproaching some despotic would-be-Inquistor), and lacks anything as useful as a map.  
  
“Do you sell food--” Dankovsky begins to ask, and the woman shutters the ticket station in his face. 

  
  
The sand surrounding the gravel road into town is a bright, unremitting grey and soon the Bachelor feels snowblind and disoriented. He can see the grey dunes of the beach now, the dark mashing of the ocean on pebbles. The leather of his coat seems to be silk gauze against the salted cold. His arm supporting the full weight of his suitcase soon grows numb with exertion, and his stomach contorts and tightens with hunger that the dried reindeer did little to remedy. He stops dead in his tracks at the sight of someone waiting beside the road for him, though the momentary mirage resolves into an inert, rough granite statue. The finer details of the bulbous figure have been lost to time, though there’s the jut of shoulders, perhaps hips. A faint, metallic scraping seems to emanate from the figure, over an undercurrent of guttural mumbles. Then a particularly large wave crashes behind him, and he can hear nothing but the untuned moan of cross-ocean wind, punctuated with percussive swell. He hurries on. An ornate but wind-blasted wooden arch leads him into (now, retroactively misnomered) Easternmost Port.  
  
The occasional passing townsfolk are all adorned in furs or padded parkas, most women in headscarves, most men in hats of wool or fur. He sidesteps a firewood cart drawn by a goat with frill-curled horns, makes it across a main road towards a shop sign. Inside the yolk-yellow facade he spends the better part of his remaining money on two overpriced rye bread rolls, out of an almost superstitious apprehension about imminent inflation. Standing on a street corner buffeted by brined air and milling conversation, he tears one bread roll into clumsy pieces and devours it. With eyes unclouded by deprivation, he catalogues his surroundings.  
  
The looming mountain is partially obscured by waves of wafting mist that start nowhere, and go nowhere. A hulking, modern fort covers one foothill. The striated, grey mountain face overlooking the city is carved into snaking, quarried planes that sharply resist topography, scattered with surface-hugging rounded structures. A bridge extends between two cliff-perched settlements, hard to make out at such a distance, but industrial and blackish. Daniil turns his focus to the township. The districts seem roughly colour-blocked into yellow and muted cyan and salmon-flesh pink. He sees one building, improbable enough to cause his recently-fed stomach to clench: an upward, narrowing staircase framed with Grecian columns, and a plain boxy office perched atop. It’s not the Polyhedron, though, not even as defiant of gravity and geometry as some of the Utopian government buildings in the Capital. There’s more ubiquitous, half-familiar landmarks too-- the bulbous white domes of a church, and behind it cog-driven cranes.

Daniil picks his way into town (finding a mercifully hygienic water pump), scales a townhouse's stoop to gain line-of-site to the ashy-flecked ocean; in the V-shaped port, fishing boats in red and blue shiver with currents, their masts stark as dead aspen against the grey cumulus. A ruddy, wooden lighthouse rises over the eastern extent of the docks like a signal fire waiting to burn. Behind it, a tattered black and white striped circus tent.  
  
After the labyrinth that was his last excursion of the Capital, he finds himself grateful for such easily picked landmarks.  
  
Dankovsky descends back into the thoroughfare, interposing the path of a woman in a pilled headscarf and wide-skirted coat. “Excuse me, do you know the way to Upper Pritchell?” he asks, unavoidable but decorous.  
  
“Certainly, sir. Should you continue out of town to the arch, and turn up towards the mountain, you’ll see the start of the path.”  
  
Daniil looks back with a frown. The ascending route she’s gesturing towards appears to be a circuitous, bothersome detour around both the fort and the mine entrance. Nothing more than an old goat herders’ track. “So, Upper Pritchell is one of the raised districts?”  
  
She nods, redirecting her outstretched finger one of the mist-obscured clusters of housing adjacent to the bridge. “There’s a funicular,” she adds.  
  
It takes a moment to pick out the track cut into the mountainside, in the heavy-air haze. As he turns back to relay cursory gratitude, his relief is replaced by curiosity and mild revulsion. The woman’s face, that he hadn’t really paid any prior heed to, is covered in pink, clear pustules. Swathes of the surrounding skin, her chin, her lips, is sloughing off in crackled grey scraps. Her eyes are so milky that the pupils are grey stone.  
  
He mutters quick thanks and turns away; he’s here as a pathologist, and this woman hasn’t succumbed yet.

  
  
He gets lost on the way to the funicular, somehow, ends up in a stone-walled playground. Children, mostly in quilted coats, clamber over a rough-hewn timber fort. One is trying to perfect a somersault.  
  
Daniil recalls the value of children’s bartering games during the Sand Pest outbreak. He sets down his suitcase and doctor’s bag, pats down his coat (not finding much) and eventually removes a mostly empty packet of matches. He begins counting them out onto an open palm slowly, theatrically.  
  
A boy approaches. His hair is dark and curly, peeking from beneath his patched blue parka. In one slightly dirtied hand is a hunk of glinting reddish ore; in the other, a cooked potato.  
  
“For the potato?” Daniil asks.  
  
“Five.”  
  
Daniil nods. Many eyes are now watching the in-progress trade. The Bachelor makes a great show of adding the sixth match to the tally.  
  
The boy puts away the rock and the matches, staring up expectantly as Daniil lingers.  
  
“My name is Dankovsky. I’m a doctor from the Capital. If any of you come by food or medical supplies, I’ll have all sorts of interesting things to trade. Do you want me to look out for anything in particular that I, an adult, might be best suited among our number to acquire?”  
  
“Mirrors,” says one girl. There is a preponderance of nodding.  
  
“Fishing hooks. Twine,” says another, younger girl. More nods. “Birdseed. Look out for birdseed.”  
  
“With both eyes,” Dankovsky agrees, with feigned solemnity. “Do you know which road will take me to the funicular station?”  
  
“Are you here to catch the Inside-Out Man?”  
  
Dankovsky gives a half-honest answer: “I don’t know why I’m here. I need to get to the funicular station.”  
  
The children have lost interest.

  
  
The funicular platform is situated confusingly, behind an apartment block and unreachable except through an unsigned alleyway. A few more of the squat stone figures sit in observation, but Dankovsky avoids them.  
  
The Bachelor is relieved to see a peeling, pine-green car stopped at the station. There’s one passenger still passing inside, another figure reading on a bench seat underneath an identically green tin-roofed shelter. The Bachelor hurries up the curled steps, and towards the open-windowed driver’s compartment, dropping his bags and pulling out his wallet. “I’d like to purchase a ticket,” he says, out-of-breath.  
  
“I don’t sell tickets,” the driver informs him, speaking clearly and slowly, as if to a simpleton.  
  
Dankovsky nods, trying to breathe through his nose so as to not tarnish his impression further. “Where should I purchase a ticket?”  
  
“At the general store.” The man gestures up the track, past the sparse pine clinging to cliff faces, and at the mountainside settlement above.  
  
“Are you-- are you serious? You want me to buy a ticket at a store that cannot be reached without a ticket?”  
  
“It depends if you’re trying to get up or down. If you’re trying to get down, the store is only a short walk from the station,” says the driver conversationally. There seems to be not a trace of irony in his slightly unfixed gaze.  
  
A deliberate prank or not, Daniil’s temper rises. “I’m here from the Capital on official business. You don’t want to become an obstacle to that,” he says, in a dangerous tone.  
  
The driver appears wholly unperturbed by the threat. He checks a pocket watch, then pulls a rope behind. A gong-like bell sounds. He seems to be readying the funicular for departure.

Daniil grimaces up at the mountainside-- the steep-scored track meandering across a barren, stump-pricked mountainside-- then down at his suitcase. “I’ll pay you the equivalent cost of a ticket twice over, to account for the additional trouble on your behalf,” he says, low and debased. “I need to--”  
  
“I have a spare ticket,” announces someone behind.  
  
A young man in an grey-black wool overcoat is idling a few paces behind the conversation. He looks young in a way unquantified by age, softish and unthoughtful. In his extended, gloved hand is a long blue cardboard strip, printed with a date, a geometric border and a long, shivering brushstroke running down the length. 

Daniil smiles at the do-gooder with all the fascicle friendliness he can muster, as he opens his wallet once more. “And you’d be willing to part with it, my good man?”  
  
“Oh, take it. They’re inexpensive. Just hold on to the split stub; one ticket covers a return trip,” the man says almost bashfully. He’s dully handsome, very well-ordered, though not in that intransigent military manner. A leatherbound notebook is closed beneath his arm. A student, then. A rich one, to be travelling, to partake in acts of charity.  
  
Daniil takes the ticket; it is every man’s own prerogative to people-please their way into poverty. He extends towards the capped funicular driver in undisguised victory.  
  
The driver unhooks a pair of strange-edged shears from his belt, and cuts the ticket on a bias. A smooth run of semi-circle waves cleave the blue cardboard. He slots one half into a small box behind, and hands the other back to Dankovsky. The quarrel appears entirely forgotten, if it ever registered. The low dividing door clicks, and Dankovsky sidles inside the car with his luggage.  
  
Daniil takes one of the empty rows of wooden seating. The only other passenger is a well-dressed young woman in an embroidered headscarf. The young man hands over a half-ticket to the driver, and sits down too close, as if an enduring friendship has been cemented.  
  
“Thank you,” Dankovsky says, putting less effort into his smile now.  
  
“You’re welcome. I was caught out when I arrived in town. It seems a very foolish system to me, but I’m not from around here.”

“Modernised cities are alike; each backwater is defunct in its own way,” the Bachelor remarks idly. 

“Defunct isn’t the word I’d use, necessarily. I mean, I don’t understand it, but it apparently works for the people living here. Like this thread-thin cable supporting all the weight of the funiculars,” the man opines, inspecting the tracks. “The truly defunct ceases to exist, over a long enough time frame. I’m missing something.”  
  
The Bachelor has seen more wholehearted rejections of gravity, even on the main street of the Capital. He intends to politely ask where the man hails from, but that his gaze has departed the wholly unremarkable conversational partner and now alights upon a bulletin board in the cable car’s interior. There’s a notice of fox hides for sale in bulk, another regarding a missing milking goat, all trivialities below Dankovsky’s consideration. One paper pinned into place merits absolute attention. A haunting sketched face. Pale eyes, dark brows affixed to a sprawl of heavy scowl lines. A half-sneer across the pronounced upper lip. A short, unfamiliar beard. The art seems to unfaithfully accentuate his steppe heritage: the depiction seems to have monolid eyes, rounder cheekbones. But for all the discrepancies, this sketch is unavoidably Artemy Burakh. ‘Wanted For Multiple Murders’, the caption urgently proclaims. Smaller text relays that the man must be assumed armed and dangerous; but that there is a sizable reward for his capture, and a marginally less sizable reward for his corpse, and a paltry pay-out for information on his whereabouts. Dankovsky removes one of his last cigarettes from his dented silver case with unsteady fingers.  
  
The funicular jolts into motion, and he drops it.


	2. Chapter 2

He receives a lot of askance glances as he lugs his suitcase first to the general store (a fastidiously courteous old woman in an oversized Orenburg shawl sells, among a few costly goat cheeses and matchsticks and furs, the ribbon-like blue tickets) and then to Upper Pritchell. The rocky district seems to be workers’ housing. Dankovsky passes men lugging firewood, sturdy women, all clad in parkas or furs and thick, hide boots. Most resemble steppe folk, though of slighter stature, all enviably immune to the chill beneath their thick garb. Only the mountain’s table-like peak is tipped with snow, but the elevation and the clinging mist have Dankovsky’s teeth chattering irrepressibly. The hexagonal huts with steep wood-shingled roofs are numbered, though not in any logical sequence Dankovsky can ascertain.   
  
In the ragged rush to get out of the cold, he can mostly repress thoughts of Burakh. Still, the occasional speculation emerges from his subconscious ruminations, and into the forefront of his mind. The Behaviorists must know their connection, which is why they dragged him all this way from the Capital. But is Burakh guilty of the murders he’s currently being hunted for? It seems entirely conceivable. He killed three men within an hour of arriving in Town-On-Gorkhon. Burakh surely has his motives (he never seemed senselessly vicious, as much as his capacity for violence was proven beyond question) but they may well be some steppe traditions and therefore absolutely inexplicable to law enforcement; and that’s if there’s any due process at all.

Finally, Dankovsky locates property number eighty-seven: cowering beneath into a grey cliff face with unfellable pines struggling out of hard-to-reach crevices above. The slightly elevated, stacked log cottage is small enough that it is surely accommodation for him alone. Daniil clambers up wooden steps, and reaches behind the discordantly delicate carvings over the low door. His gloved fingers clumsily grasp cold metal, and he withdraws the key then pushes with relief inside the cabin. It’s just as cold inside, but he can set down his belongings, and there’s a stack of firewood beside the traditional, white lime-and-brick stove. He builds a clumsy fire, and begins tearing up the two obfuscating letters as kindling, regretting trading away any matches. The fire stuttering to life, Dankovsky hunches in close and begins to examine his accomodation. There’s a small-ish water barrel perched on the bench beside the stove. The furniture is all use-scuffed, rustic, cramped; the only bed space is a pile of cushioning and furs tucked in a nook above the stove, the only storage space a small cupboard. Dankovsky, warm enough to at last turn his mind to the promised supplies, hurries to pull the cupboard open.   
  
A veritable bounty awaits. Four cans of various foodstuffs, a loaf of seed-studded rye bread, a bundle of matches, a cardboard box of army-issue cigarettes, and coin about equivalent to a week of his pathologist’s wages. Daniil smokes one cheap cigarette as he unpacks his suitcase. His microscope appears to be in one piece, though he hasn’t the time to check every objective lens. He gets to the false bottom of his suitcase, pries out the leather document wallet containing his now illicit research (time as a pliable dimension, its directional interactions with chemical processes in living cells and its non-interaction with the human soul), and hides the file beneath the goat wool bedroll atop the thick, gradually warming bricks of the stove.

  
  
He adjusts the air intake to ensure a very gradual burn to warm the little cottage for the night. With only his doctor’s supplies in hand he heads back down the bleak mountainside. Crows scatter off the track ahead of the descending funicular car. Then, equipped with only rough directions from a mine-worker also riding the funicular down, the Bachelor locates the town hall within the cyan 'Furnace District'.   
  
It was not one of the buildings he picked out while surveying the town, for a simple reason: it’s scarcely visible, even from the arched wooden entrance woven about with bright ribbons. The building itself is barely shoulder height, like quicksand is in the process of swallowing this windowless town hall, occupants and all. There’s a featureless staircase leading up to the flat roof, and about halfway across the flat plain of brown and grey square stone tiles sits a grand stone doorway. There seems to be security posted at the crypt-like entrance. Dankovsky sets his shoulders, and regrets pettily burning his official summons. The wind hurtles across the roof and flicks his coat around his calves as he crosses the chessboard-like tiles. The overcast sky is beginning to darken into an over-layered, amateurish watercolour.   
  
“Can I help you?” asks the man, taking a drag of his cigarette. Not security. No hat to ward off the weather, but he’s turned up the shiny grey, persian lamb collar of his woolen overcoat, and his fingers gripping the cigarette are inside matte grey gloves. He’s in his late forties or fifties, but between his perspicacious eye contact, his heavy jaw, and his barrel chest, it is apparent that this man is not ceding any ground to the comfortable infirmity of age. Both the short haircut and the double-breasted cut of coat remind Dankovsky of the military-- not the Army’s current uniform and grooming regulations, but a composite, platonic estimation of what a military man ought to look like. A smart, officious thug, then; but even a hint of intelligence would put him at a marked tactical advantage to the quotidian state-sponsored bullies Dankovsky’s dealt with since Thanatica’s research was banned.   
  
“Doctor Daniil Dankonsky,” the Bachelor says, almost certain he’s looking at one of the Behaviourists.   
  
“Hello, Doctor. Agent Tench, with the Commission for Behavioural Limitation,” the man confirms, putting the lit cigarette between his lips, extending his hand.   
  
Dankovsky steps forward to the businesslike greeting. There’s a vigour to the handshake, that only serves to reinforce Daniil’s estimation of this man as a reformed brute.   
  
“We expected you this morning,” the man says. Daniil’s fragile calm begins to fracture, but before he can truly internally fume Tench follows up: “Which, I’m sure, makes us seem very stupid. To expect trains to run on time in a town like this.” He barks out a laugh, over the wind. “I hope the delay wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. We’re very grateful that you travelled all of this way.”   
  
The tact is unexpected enough to stagger Daniil’s reply. “I only hope that I can be of assistance.”   
  
“And you found your accommodation okay? We had several interviews today, so we couldn’t wait at the station to greet you.”   
  
“I found my way. ...thank you for stocking the place so thoroughly,” he adds cagily, reluctant to reveal his own poverty.   
  
Tench smiles, though the expression is hard to read. “We have another day before Wendy arrives on the steamer. We want a good foundational base of information, so we’re interviewing families of victims, other mine workers. We don’t want to miss a connecting thread, and construct an inaccurate narrative of the crimes.”   
  
“Wendy?”   
  
“Oh. Inquisitor Kahr.”   
  
Tench says her name with a friendliness that Dankovsky assumed the Inquisitorial occupation precluded. (Though, he supposes Artemy developed a certain affinity with Aglaya Lilich.) The name ‘Kahr’ sounds familiar, though not in association with any lackey of The Powers That Be. Dankovsky thinks he’s heard of a Professor Kahr, possibly at one of north-east universities near the capital. Psychophysics?   
  
“We’re set up down here,” Tench gestures. “Underground, which I suppose a pathologist is used to. I personally can’t stand it. I keep taking smoke breaks to see sky overhead,” he explains, as he begins to descend the spiralling staircase.   
  
Daniil trails along, past a first landing with a closed door. The Agent opens the doorway on the second landing they come to, though the spiral staircase continues down into the bowels of the earth.   
  
Daniil steps through into a small, unexpectedly high-ceilinged room, partitioned into crowded desks and what must be an interview table in the center of the room. The space is lit by gas torchieres of warm yellow glass, giving a dust-storm sheen to the issuing light. The far wall is covered with papers: what Dankovsky instantly recognises as state autopsy reports, crime scene photographs and sketches, labelled family trees, and botanists' diagrams of herbs.

Standing before the chronicle of murder stands the blandly handsome young man from the funicular station, hands clasped behind his back. He smiles at the arrival, the expression somehow grotesque despite his pleasant appearance. “Agent Fyordorov,” he greets, crossing the room to greet him with an extended hand. “Ah, I suspected it might be you riding the funicular, being a newcomer with luggage on hand.”    
  
A crawling flush creeps up Daniil’s neck. He resists the urge to crush the younger man’s fingers in the handshake; perhaps he’s less soft than he appears. “You should have said hello,” he forces, and a smile with it.  _ Did this bastard put up the wanted poster just to see how I’d react? _   
  
“I felt I should be prudent about who I go around introducing myself to, considering the seriousness of this investigation,” Fyordorov says. The lie is both rehearsed and insufficient. Perhaps the test is in two parts: whether Dankovsky can be led by the nose, and how he reacts to finding that out.   
  
Dankovsky doesn’t deign to respond. The Behaviorists might have the authority to see him brutally punished for insolence, but it could be worth it.   
  
Agent Tench has stepped towards the central table, folding himself casually into a seat. Fyordorov collects a few files, and follows. There’s one seat opposite them. This is an ambush, of course, but Dankovsky’s dominant reaction is still one of annoyance, not apprehension. He sits too.   
  
Fyordorov still doesn’t look much older than a student, but he’s carrying himself as if on perfectly level authority with the older Agent Tench. He takes the lead now: “We’re looking for Artemy Isidorovich Burakh. He is our prime suspect in nine murders. We came directly from Town-On-Gorkhon, where the initial seven murders occurred. I understand you were there less than a year ago, attending to a plague outbreak.”   
  
“I was in town for another, distinct reason,” Dankovsky replies, though he’s not entirely certain they were so distinct. “The plague broke out, so I did what I could.”   
  
Fyordorov removes a notebook and pen from the pocket of his dark, plain overcoat. He writes something down. “I hear that you very quickly made the acquaintance of Artemy Burakh.” Fyordorov says it reverentially, as if putting a name to an old world god. He flips open one of the files ravenously, removes the wanted poster sketch. “The aspiring surgeon. Twenty nine years old. Four years into his study, achieving just above average grades, he was drafted as a field medic as part of the new wartime mandate. Underwent five months of training, then was deployed into the field in a speciality surgical clinic. Saw action only once, according to military records. A shortage of medical staff in cities led to a new mandate, which saw him discharged to resume his studies. Just under a year ago, he requests urgent leave from his surgical school for a family matter. Before that was even approved, he departs towards home. He finds his father dead, or commits the murder himself; there seems to be disagreement amongst the locals, and the investigation was, perhaps purposefully, bungled. His value as a ...half-qualified doctor during a plague outbreak was enough to spare him mob justice, in any event. My understanding is that he never returned to the front after the plague was eradicated, and did not seek out additional training or qualification. He seems to have resigned himself to dispensing folk medicine in what was left of his home town.”   


Dankovsky didn’t know that the Haruspex had been drafted as a combat medic, but he knew Burakh was not yet certified. (That tidbit, Stanislav Rubin had been eager to relay.) It seems only natural that Burakh remained afterwards as the town’s menkhu. The Haruspex made the town what it is; abandoning his own disfigured progeny would be unthinkable to an aspirant caretaker.

“His mother died in childbirth, leaving Artemy to be reared single-handedly by his Father, Isidor Burakh,” Agent Fyordorov says, sliding forward an illustration. This sketch is cursory, undetailed: a serious man, with a shaved head. Rubin’s choice of self-presentation becomes transparent. “Revered by the educated townsfolk and the steppe people alike. Highly intelligent by all accounts, though superstitious and lacking formal training. Deftly maneuvered through the political tensions in the town, which helped defer the inevitable conflicts. And, perhaps by design, cemented his own importance. An impossible man to live up to. My understanding is that you didn’t meet him.”   
  
“He was already dead when I arrived in town.”   
  
“We have testimony from Burakh’s childhood friends about his exposure to bloodthirsty steppe superstitions at a very young age,” Fyordorov says, in an inappropriately invigorated tone. “We interviewed twenty seven people in town, all up. Some respected him, some feared him. But even those who looked up to him called him ‘Butcher’, ‘Ripper’, ‘Haruspex’, ‘Menkhu’.” 

Dankovsky’s skin crawls at the quantity of research squeezing in from the far wall of the claustrophobic room. This is not the intuition or rhetorical inquiry of an Inquisitor. This is a scientific dissection of a human life; a bloodless, fleshless autopsy. 

Fyordorov is thumbing through his files. “He had taken over the role perpetuating the-- ah--”   
  
“Barbaric blood sacrifice,” Tench helps.   
  
Fyordorov smiles, even more horrifying this time. “But it’s not just cattle and their own women that they butcher. A hundred years ago, when the eastern expansion project was in fragile infancy, there were similar murders. A colonial party of almost fifteen were found at the site they intended to build a village upon. Skin opened so smoothly it seemed as if the victims had laid down in easy acceptance. Long, surgical cuts into flesh of men and women and even a child. Hearts removed. Intestines stretched into strange formations, studded with herbs. The army razed a couple of the nearby Steppe villages to the ground in retribution, and such murders didn’t happen again. But this human sacrifice is not new, Doctor. If I know the story, you can be assured Burakh does too. I’m sure he considers it part of his heritage.”   
  
Dankovsky feels a sweat forming at his hairline, in spite of the stale, cellar-like cool around him.   
  
“So, an ambitious young man leaves for the capital, determined to surpass his father’s legacy. His attempts are frustrated by--”   
  
Daniil can’t restrain a chuckle as the illusion of voyeuristic, hyper-focused omniscience is instantly dispelled.    
  
Fyordorov goes dead silent, head tilted.   
  
“The quality I disdained and admired most in Burakh was his absolute dearth of ambition,” the Bachelor corrects, leaning back in his chair. “He did not leave his hometown because he saw himself as above his station; he left because his father willed it, and he was an obedient son.”   
  
“We heard differently,” Agent Tench finally contributes, still nursing the same cigarette.   
  
“Then you asked the people who resented him for leaving, and heard only the most uncharitable interpretation,” Daniil explains with an unforgiving, close-lipped smile.   
  
Agent Fyordorov is note-taking with renewed intensity. Daniil suddenly suspects he’s being fed false information, or unfinished hypotheses, to goad him into making corrections. “What was your impression of Artemy Burakh, other than lacking in ambition?” Fyordorov asks.   
  
Daniil decides to err on the side of equivocations. “Extremely hard-working, trying to do good in his own, unenlightened way. His intellectually unexplored notions of morality were comprised of an archaic sense of duty, and a narrow-minded reading of the Hippocratic oath that prioritised immediacy over broader scientific accomplishments. He showed a willingness to defend himself, not extraordinary bloodlust. The town’s nicknames for him were apocryphal; the local people harboured illogical superstitions against the most basic of surgical operations. ...most in that town wouldn’t even butcher meat, and their primary industry was an abattoir.”   
  
“Surgical operations earned him his nicknames? ...would you define haruspicy as a surgical operation?” Tench asks, eyebrow raised.   
  
Daniil doesn’t quite resist his impulse towards flippancy: “Well, I didn’t see him cut anyone open and perform ancient divination rituals using entrails. Then again, he may have been a little busy trying to cure the Plague that was decimating the town.”   
  
The imposing Behaviourist takes his time to inhale nicotine-laden smoke, then exhale it away from the table, and his younger partner. “I ask because these ritualistic murders seem evocative of haruspicy,” he points out shrewdly. “So it’s quite a coincidence, if the nickname is indeed meaningless.”   
  
“Not even to mention the monicker 'Ripper',” Fyordorov contributes softly.   
  
The unavoidable crime scene photo looms behind Fyordorov’s features. Daniil can see herbs braided into spewing organs. What did the Kin call the little orange flowers?    
  
Fyordorov follows his eyes, glancing back at the carnage without a hint of distaste. “Those are steppe herbs. Placed amongst the woman’s connective tissue, her intestines.”   
  
“It looks like some form of barbaric steppe tradition, I’d allow that,” Dankovsky mutters, unable to tear his eyes away.  _ The same sort of barbaric steppe traditions that led Burakh to a functional cure long before me,  _ he chides himself. “I’m a man of science; I’ll save my judgments until after examination of all available evidence.”   
  
“I respect that. I’ve prepared a thorough set of investigative notes, so that you may feel comfortable providing expert opinion,” Fyordorov flatters, hefting a heavy leather satchel. He sets it on the table between them with a hide-drum thud. “I’ve enclosed blank paper. Any insights you gleaned on the societal and shamanistic role of a menkhu would be much appreciated.” He stands, though his examination of Dankovsky remains unrelenting. “And anything else pertinent to Burakh’s overall psyche that you might recall,” he adds pointedly.   
  
Daniil takes it as a dismissal, slings the satchel over his shoulder. “And when I’m done?”   
  
“Tomorrow, we reconvene. The bodies were relocated to the local tribe’s old crypt on the mountain top, so that they would keep until the arrival of a pathologist. The woman was killed a week and a half ago, so her body will be more degraded. We’ll bring both down for you. Shall we make it… nine?”   
  
It leaves Daniil very little time to read anything if he’s to get any sleep at all, but he grits his teeth and nods.   
  
Tench rises wordlessly to escort him out.   


Dankovsky manages to remain silent up about three quarters of the spiral staircase. “Do you know Fyordorov was waiting at the funicular to approach me incognito?” he asks sourly as his self-control gives.   
  
Tench is only a fraction behind him, and side-steps him rather than pausing to converse. “Yes.” As he overtakes Dankovsky, a tiny quirk of frustration in his crow’s feet and in the lips taut around a cigarette belies the monosyllabic response.   
  
Danvosky is too spent to apply further diagnostic pressure to this fracture between partners. He fires a verbal warning shot instead: “I’d prefer to do my job without being fucked with for sport.” It sounds like what Burakh himself would say.   
  
It was the wrong choice. Tench’s shoulders set as if the strictest of superiors has walked by. “My partner thinks you may not be entirely forthcoming if approached in a more direct manner. Do you believe you’ve sufficiently allayed those fears with your responses today?”   
  
“I didn’t realize I was summoned from the Capital to allay your partner’s fears.”

Tench scoffs, and stops walking. “Burakh fooled you a year ago. Don’t cling to an old mistake, Doctor.” The words are too deliberately chosen. Dankovsky thinks of his thanatological research underneath his mattress, then muscles down his own paranoia.

It’s gusty, lightless, and below freezing as Dankovsky reaches his accommodation; the funicular, thankfully, seems to run at all hours. He decides to buy a fur coat, preferably one with a hood. The fire is still smouldering, and a few pieces of pine wood stoke it into a muted blaze.   
  
Dankovsky eats some hearty, slightly salted rye bread, drinks some very cold water, huddled over the stove. Feeling further from a hypothermic death, he lights the vaguely maritime oil lamp that’s tucked above the stove, opens the satchel of documentation, and begins to read at the tiny table that will suffice as a desk.   
  
The mounting wind around the cabin shrieks like a folklore crone. The files seem to be in chronological order, so Dankovsky adheres to that recommendation and begins with the historical atrocity. The contemporary accounts are both obnoxiously floral and lacking in specificity; he’s half-way through a frustrating, flowery sentence about a body found suspended from a tree by leather straps when he hears the door softly click, and sees movement in the corner of his eye.   
  
Dankovsky reaches for his revolver, but the shape has stepped into the lamp light. 

Beneath a cap that bristles with snow-splattered fur, adorned in a patchwork fox fur overcoat, stands the Haruspex. Whatever he picked the door with is no longer in his hands; his palms are open, raised, as if seeking mercy.   
  
“You could have knocked,” the Bachelor comments bitterly. He doesn’t draw his gun, though his fingers stray closer to the holster.   
  
“I heard a doctor fitting your description came from the Capital. I didn’t know if it was you,” Burakh says as he pulls off his hat, then the huge, crude coat. Beneath is a familiar green uniform. In the low-roofed hut, the tall, bearded man has to stoop a little to avoid the wooden beams as he hangs the coat up.   
  
“And if it wasn’t, what were you planning on doing to the other doctor? Slicing them open while they slept?” Daniil asks, resisting the urge to nervously stand.   
  
“I would have left, quietly. ...I believed it would be you. Do you know you’re staying in the home of one of the victims?”   
  
Dankovsky’s dislike of the Behaviorists deepens. “Lucky, then, that I’m not given to superstition.”

“I’m glad to see you, oynon.”   
  
Dankovsky scoffs at the sentiment. “Why? I’m here as a pathologist, assisting men determined to see you brought to justice. An Inquisitor is on her way. This house might be under observation, for all I know. There’s nothing for you in this town but a five foot drop and a sharp stop, Burakh. You should commandeer a fishing boat and skip town.”   
  
“I need to clear my name before I can go back home.”   
  
Daniil releases a breath he didn’t quite know he was holding at the tacit admission of innocence. “The easiest way to clear your name would be to find the true guilty party. Do you know who that is?”   
  
“Maybe.”   
  
“You’re wanted for nine murders, two here in this town,” Daniil says, frowning. “You could do better than ‘maybe’.”   
  
"A strange woman came to me months ago, claiming to need help with a plague in a village I’ve never heard of, that I’ve never been able to locate on a map. Shortly after, the bloodshed began in my hometown. I came here; the bloodshed followed.” Perhaps sensing the suspicion, Burakh raises his hands again. “I promise you I haven’t killed anyone in this town.”   
  
“What a  _ comforting _ qualifier that you must add to that clause.”   
  
That seems to rankle the slightly hunched man. He edges to the center of the cottage, so that he may pull himself upright. “And how clean are your own hands, erdem?”   
  
“Killing a mortal thing is very different to killing what may have otherwise been immortal,” Dankovsky returns, narrowing his eyes.   
  
Artemy Burakh returns his gaze shamelessly. “I’m a doctor; human lives sit higher on my priorities than aspirations.”   
  
“My aspirations concerned all human lives. Everywhere. Forever.” Daniil’s voice frays like slashed silk. “You’re very brave to come here, Burakh.”   
  
“Not brave. Desperate.” Artemy Burakh wavers for a moment, then grows steely once more. His eyes are on Dankovsky’s desk. “Is that my supposed butchery?”   
  
“I’m still a hundred years or so behind your current spree. The Behaviourists claim a connection between these historic slayings and--” Artemy steps forward, and Daniil cuts himself off, scrambles to stand and draw his revolver. Burakh frowns without stopping, leaning over the desk at about the exact moment the revolver finally trains on his temple. He opens the leather satchel, begins to sort through papers with single-minded concentration.   
  
Daniil’s firefight pulse begins to settle. He re-holsters his weapon sheepishly.   
  
Artemy pays no heed to the Behaviourists’ careful filing, splaying pages across Daniil’s desk in his haste. He finds what he is looking for and the frenzied motion settles stone still. “This is the third and fourth murder that occurred in my hometown, though the order is-- is unclear,” murmurs Artemy. His voice is gravelly, and he seems unwilling to look up from the paper clutched in his hands.   
  
Daniil steps back to the oil lamp light, to look down at what Burakh is holding. A crime scene photograph: two bodies lying close, intestines spilled and interwoven in a curious manner. They’re laid out on train tracks. It takes a moment to recognise the faces, hollow with blood loss, empty of all bright possibility. The girl is Victoria Oglimsky; the boy, Caspar Kain. A fury beats unexpectedly into the Bachelor’s very heart like a hundred military drummers beginning a synchronized drumroll. Those two had vision, had ambition, had a legacy to forge; it is not human lives lost, it is a colossal, cosmic clockwork of potentials.   
  
“I didn’t kill them,” says Burakh, voice so low as to be inaudible were they not standing side-by-side. His breathing is ragged.   
  
“Okay,” Daniil agrees, at once. Then, “So, this isn’t about clearing your name. This is about revenge.”   
  
The Haruspex sets the photo down gentle as if it were a child, instead of an abstracted depiction. His eyes are red, though not wet. “I am a wanted man, and you are my only ally in this town. The townsfolk liked me well enough at first. They think the mine is poisoning them, and I said I would help them. But the Behaviorists have put up posters offering a reward. Soon, someone will take the money. There’s been nowhere safe to rest.”   
  
“Are the local people here your Kin too?” Daniil asks.   
  
“Kin-of-Kin. Some of their words are familiar. Some, I do not know. Many people are forced to live together now that their forests have been felled. Oynon, I have to sleep. This day has not been kind to me.”   
  
Dankovsky frowns impermissibly, turning back to his notes. In his periphery, he sees Artemy begin to unlace his boots anyway. “I can see why they suspect you, Burakh: eerily precise cuts that no formally trained surgeon would think to make, swevery braided into the small intestine of a victim. We’re very, very far from the steppe.”   
  
“We are. Too far to have brought fresh herbs. Swevery flowers are delicate, and last only a week or two once pulled from the ground. I don’t understand it.”   
  
Dankovsky turns his chair enough to look up at where Artemy’s hulking form is contorting into the small nook of bedspace. “A man like you might bring the steppe with him. Do strange things bloom under your heel?”   
  
A miserable expression washes across Artemy’s features, then away just as quickly. He rearranges his limbs as if climbing into a coffin two feet too short. “You work in pathology now?” he deflects.   
  
“Death became my close acquaintance during the Sand Plague. I’m not one to shun old friends.” Daniil pats his pockets down for a cigarette, lighting it, trying not to smile at Burakh’s discomfortable attempts to wrap the too-small furs about his shoulders. “Clearly.”   
  
“If only old friends could find you to know that fidelity,” Burakh says, seeming to struggle to keep his eyes open. “Mail from Eva, from the Stamatins, went undelivered.”   
  
“They almost certainly were writing to the wrong postal address. Thanatica was deemed heretical and hubristic, so letters would have gone undelivered to my old office. Then, I had to rent cheaper accommodation in accordance with my new salary,” the Bachelor says snippily, though he wonders how Burakh knows of undelivered mail. Did he, too, write?   
  
“But your thanatological study continues?”   
  
“My study is not permitted to continue. I have uniformed raids every other week.”   
  
“I didn’t ask whether it was permitted.”   
  
The Bachelor scrapes his chair back into his desk, turning away from the conversation. He ashes his cigarette, grimacing down at the muddled papers. “Perhaps if you could explain a menkhu’s cuts to me, I’d be more helpful to the people seeking to hang you.”   
  
Artemy doesn’t respond. For a moment, Daniil wonders if finally the needling hit something too tender. He turns, and sees Burakh’s eyes are closed.   
  
He waits a few minutes, meditating upon the inked autopsy diagram carelessly discarded in Artemy’s search for the crime scene photo. An amorphous outline is criss-cross with long, languid flows of red barbarity. Not Burakh’s work. But the Haruspex took something far more precious from this world. Daniil unholsters his loaded gun. He smothers it with his gloved fingers as he very, very slowly pulls the hammer back. There’s a scarcely audible click at half-cock, then another as the hammer is fully drawn.   
  
He steps out from the desk and aims the gun up into the sleeping space, at the forehead of the slumbering Haruspex.

An easy shot to make, even if his hand is shaking with imminent vengeance. Perhaps some of that quiver is indecision, though that particular emotion is unfamiliar to Daniil Dankovsky, and so harder to precisely identify. Artemy Burakh is not nearly as imposing curled on his side, his perpetually wrinkled brow softening like steam-smoothed linen. Even with his eyes closed, the death-grey bruising of sleep deprivation clings to his features. Daniil eases his thumb between the hammer and the chambered bullet, and carefully renders his weapon harmless. He stows it away inside the holster as he sits, defeated, at his desk.

As he refiles the photos of dead children, he finds himself grateful for the company.


	3. Chapter 3

The Bachelor has made it through the historic accounts and on to the killings in Town-On-Gorkon when Artemy Burakh wakes, all of two hours later. Burakh immediately knocks his head against the low wooden roof, growls a series of what must be steppe swear words, then clambers down with his shoulders cautiously stooped. Dishevelled and scowling, he looks every part the unhinged madman. Daniil hides a grin.  
  
The Bachelor tries to go back to the florid descriptions of desecrated corpses and his sleep-deprivation-induced headache, though mostly surreptitiously watches Burakh reordering himself (shaving off his beard with a surgeon’s precision over the tiny, mirrorless washbasin, pulling the fur-lined boots back on). Artemy goes through the single cupboard without asking permission and opens a can of cod.  
  
He approaches the desk, picking into Daniil’s provisions with the only cutlery Daniil found in the barren cottage: a fork with one bent tine. There’s a disguised desperation in how quickly the oily strips of fish disappear, but the conversation is too casual; “I was led to this town by...”, then the Haruspex abandons his own explanation as he skewers a long, curled fillet.  
  
Daniil groans under his breath; with the wind relenting to only a thin, unhappy whisper, Burakh probably heard that. “The urging of a carved out liver? The flight patterns of birds? Prophetic dreams?”  
  
Artemy blinks unhappily (the scored frown lines have reappeared like a mask on a player) but nods at the last, sarcastic guess. “I saw you on an impossibly heavy iron bridge. And another with us. Clara.”  
  
“Ah. The girl who claims to have ‘healing hands’.”  
  
Artemy nods again. “At the circus tent, there is a girl who looks like Clara-- or, I suppose, the Changeling-- but she spoke in another voice, and she didn’t recognise me. At least, she pretended that she didn’t.”  
  
A latent, largely unexplored horror reels up through Daniil’s nervous system like a reanimating electrical current. “If the three of us are residing in a single township, it can only be a matter of time before some form of armageddon descends too,” he says, affecting dry detachment to mask the foreboding.  
  
“I’m not ‘residing’ here,” Artemy counters. “I’ve been in town two weeks. I’ve slept in the junkyard, and in a caravan behind the circus tent. If I had a residence, I wouldn’t have needed your hospitality. I have no room nor board.”  
  
“I don’t recall the plague sparing temporary visitors, nor the destitute.”  
  
“The plague didn’t spare anything human.” The Haruspex discards the empty can into a small trash bin beside the stove, then washes the fork diligently. Not completely uncivilised after all. “But the plague didn’t get final say,” he mutters. He doesn’t quite meet Daniil’s eye as he reaches into the utility bag holstered to his thigh, and removes a small, ruby bottle.  
  
Daniil is certain this must be the rumoured panacea, and wonders at the fact Burakh has been carrying it so long. A memento? A good luck charm, like the Kin’s woven string? “I was being facetious, Burakh. The Sand Pest is gone.”  
  
“It has been gone before,” Artemy says, placing the bottle away protectively. “We made many batches of cures, stored them underground in hopes that they would not degrade. Rubin maintains that a vaccine may be possible, though there is no longer a disease to conduct trials.”  
  
An exercise in futility. Daniil wonders if he’s not the only one self-flagellating for failure to curb the plague. “And other than that ongoing impotency, how is Stanislav?”  
  
“He and Lara are well,” Artemy replies, too abruptly.  
  
Jealousy? Dankovsky long suspected some old connection between Ravel and Burakh. You must be past-blinded to let a suspected murderer sleep in your home. Perhaps this is a more childish, twofold jealousy at having lost close friends to each other. Daniil struggles to resist a yawn, and decides to indulge curiosity at a later date. He turns to more practical matters: “How did the dream lead you here? Have you been to town before?”  
  
Burakh shakes his head. “I asked Peter Stamatin, and he knew of the bridge, and of this town. He and his brother came here to study it, before the construction of the Polyhedron.”  
  
“So, Town-On-Gorkon’s foremost architects have been here. The town surgeon is here currently. The Easternmost Port is hundreds of miles from your hometown, there’s no discernable reason for such myriad connections. Any theories yet as to why this town is such a decidedly intimate neighbour?”  
  
Burakh, leaning over to examine the photograph of victim number two (an opened and strung aloft steppe woman), shrugs distractedly. He opens his mouth-- perhaps to attribute this set of coincidences to some folksy theory like “Lines”-- but pauses, then changes tack. “No. Maybe you could ask your Behaviorists.”  
  
“Those two have no answers. I’m unimpressed in every regard other than the depth of research into you. That, I have to allow, is an oeuvre unto itself.”  
  
Burakh isn’t aglow at the prospect of Agent Fyordorov’s special attention. He’s flicking through the very thorough notes on steppe traditions. There are two note-takers amongst the untyped pages: a rigidly legible hand prone to abbreviations that is surely Agent Tench, and a more languid hand prone to self-justification and tangentially-related digressions that Dankovsky takes to be Agent Fyordorov. The explanations of the Kin’s traditions, taboos, religious beliefs are almost all recorded by the younger Agent; Burakh doesn’t seem to have any corrections to offer, but he seems displeased nonetheless. “Don’t cross them. One outstanding death sentence between the two of us should suffice.”  
  
“For example, if the man they were looking for came to my house: I should turn him away, then inform the authorities and collect the generous reward?” Daniil asks dryly.  
  
“Or allow him in, then shoot him in his sleep,” returns Artemy, with a brief, dead-eyed smile.  
  
Dankovsky is disturbed both that Artemy was aware of the threat to his life, and that there was no effort to fight or to flee. “Ira furor brevis est,” he quotes. He finishes the idiom only in his own head.  
  
That earns an almost-nostalgic, entreating stare. Artemy sets the paper down. “Keep the Behaviorists busy while I find the real Ripper.” The Haruspex pulls his coat on, then the low-brimmed, furred hat.  
  
“Do you have somewhere else to sleep? No, drop the offended expression,” Daniil adds, with an exhausted huff. “If you don’t, I’ll leave the key concealed over the door arch.”  
  
“If this house is being watched, I shouldn’t visit again. They’ll hang us side-by-side, oynon.”  
  
“I’ve never been one to turn down a potentially fruitful partnership,” Dankovsky jokes. He’s over-tired, and shouldn’t be alluding to his own perennial suicidal ideation. Burakh is too shrewd. He steps in front of the doorway. “You’ll be coming back, regardless of the danger it poses to either of us; I’m in an advantageous position to help you find the person who murdered your young charges.”

Burakh actually smiles, though it isn’t kind. His left canine has a noticeable chip out of the point. A souvenir from the mayhem in the final days of the plague, perhaps. “Why, you could be mistaken for lonely.”  
  
Daniil rolls his eyes. “But I’ll need to know who I’m searching for, Burakh. Your usual vagaries and deflection aren’t going to cut it. The strange woman you mentioned, what did she look like? Did she tell you her name?”  
  
“She was of the steppe. She used our words, talked of Mother Boddho and the hungry rot of her absence. She called herself Saneku. She said her village was Belol, that it was infected. For all that, she seemed perpetually on the verge of laughter. I went to find Rubin, to consult him, to fetch the stored cures. By the time I’d returned, she was gone.”  
  
Daniil pushes a thumb between his brows, trying to stop the clamorous headache. “Her physical appearance would be more helpful, Burakh. There’s no point combing through documents for what is almost certainly a fake name, given that it was offered alongside a fake town.”  
  
“To me, a woman perhaps your age. She had black hair cropped to her earlobes thick and straight, and wore a long leather pinafore. She moved strong and assured, like a danseur.”  
  
Artemy Burakh hasn’t been to the ballet on his student’s budget. Dankovsky stops cradling his forehead so that his scathing stare is more obvious. “Can you be more specific? ...and what do you mean, _to you_ ?”  
  
“She’d already spoken to Stakh, sent him on an impossible, urgent errand. He described her as an unfamiliar bird-boned, redhead girl. Murky saw her own father leaving the house, though it was hard to convince her to talk about it. She ran back to hide in her train car.”  
  
Dankovsky had forgotten how frustrating he finds Artemy’s tendency towards fanciful thinking. “So, there’s more than one perpetrator. We’re looking at an organised cult.”  
  
“Murky’s father is dead.”  
  
“She’s a child. A traumatised child. They flinch from shadows.”  
  
Artemy Burakh is not smiling any more. Without so much as a good-bye (Daniil hardly expected one; he’s accustomed to Burakh’s taciturn efficiency) the wanted man departs into the blistering black pre-dawn.  
  
Daniil hides the key over the doorway, latches the door from the inside. 

He hasn’t finished reading the notes, but he’ll have to go into his autopsies under-prepared or else risk passing out from exhaustion. In the depths of his leather doctor’s bag he locates the padded brown case of morphine ampoules (carefully purloined from the well-stocked pharmacy inside the Capital’s Clinical Hospital, with inflated wartime prices). A necessary survival tactic during the Sand Pest outbreak quickly became chemical dependency on the sleep aid; his unmedicated insomnia is an untenable waste of time in his already overcrowded daily schedule. It’s not a romantic, full-blooded addiction-- rather, a marriage of convenience. 

Daniil screws the hypodermic needle into his syringe, cracks an ampoule with the corner of his shirt then draws his needle full. Finding a vein is a pulsing blue calendar: various injection sites that he’s loathe to reuse too soon and risk collapsing veins. He settles for his underutilised left basilic. First there’s the uncomfortable intravenous fullness, then, a few breathless seconds later while carefully extracting the needle without tugging at the tunica, the relief he needs. A sensation of homecoming; of twyrine bloom smog; of warm, suspended dust.

Increasingly sluggish, he cleans the syringe head with boiling water, wipes it down with alcohol-soaked cotton and sets it back into the case. He pulls loose his scuffed boots, and with trembling limbs scales what feels Sisyphus’s mountain to curl atop the still smouldering stove.

  
  
He dreams of the end of the world, and it is beautiful.  
  
A smoothness coming over the land, the death of all things striving to complexity. A calmness, a lack of colour, a lack of intent. Cloudless, starless, moonless. A singularity of above and below.

  
  
He wakes himself shivering, the unattended fire having dwindled and the pile of furs not sufficiently trapping his own body heat. He’ll have to sleep in his coat from now on. The small clock over the mantle tells him it’s half past eight, which means he’s behind schedule. He shaves over a basin, realizing now that Burakh was using his razor too. He’s clumsy in the cold, with no mirror, nicks the gooseflesh forming beneath his jawline. He nurses the cold-slowed clot and his own ego as he skims the remaining dozen pages of notes, attention interrupted by a child knocking on the door to inform him that he's expected by the Behaviorists not in town, but at the fort.

  
  
The mist has left the mountain, leaving it stark and unimaginative. The town, in turn, is swallowed up by fog, like a great surge of sea-froth is devastating the little port in slow motion. Dankovsky is far too late to admire the bright, stratospheric majesty of the scenery. He’s rushed on the unstable gravel track and almost loses his footing as he passes the junction that steers off into the mine’s entrance. Beyond a chained gate, a rough-cut maw of sparkling igneous rock is studded parasitically with wooden lattices. There’s some miners huddled in a pack of cigarette smoke away from the mine’s entrance. Concerns of a gas seam, maybe.  
  
In a vale between the mountain and foothills, the Bachelor's path is blocked by a goat herd. The creatures have thick curled drapes of white and grey wool, horns richly textured curls, like artillery shell trails on a very still day. Glassy light eyes follow his advance. Daniil can’t see a herder, but the creatures cannot be truly wild: there’s no skittishness, almost no movement at all. He circumvents the herd anyway; the lower side of the track gives way to a clear-felled, sheer slope that a charging buck could probably send him down. Daniil wants a better death than ignominious slapstick.

  
  
The fort is a series of low, round buildings jostling against each other, reluctantly forced to share at least one or two walls. Windowless, except for gun slits. The massive cast-iron gate is currently open, and a familiar man is smoking and waiting.  
  
“Shall we get started?” Dankovsky asks Agent Tench, rather than admitting he might be late.  
  
“While we were buying food this morning, my partner set his camera case down to search for correct change,” Agent Tench begins, pleasantly conspiratorial, as if laying the groundwork for an inspired punchline. “One of the local weavers waiting in line behind us deliberately knocked the case off the counter. He’s trying to get the camera repaired now.” He gives a wry grin, which Dankovsky doesn’t share.  
  
“You said deliberately. Do you think she was sabotaging the investigation?”  
  
“There’s a mirror in the viewfinder,” Tench says. “Some of the townsfolk were complaining, as he took photos of the crime scenes. There’s a superstition against reflective surfaces, from what I gather. So, superstition, or this woman really hated Agent Fyordorov.” He’s smiling into his cigarette now. “Maybe there’s something to that second theory.”  
  
Dankovsky hums ambivalently; he’s getting the impression that Tench is allowed to complain about his partner, but other people aren’t. “Why was an army base built to protect a port of this size?” he asks, more as a means of backfilling Agent Tench’s career than out of genuine curiosity.  
  
“I don’t know precisely the rationale. If there was a decent wager on the line, I’d guess it was built because the heavy metals from the mine were a prospective reagent in chemical weaponry. That would make this port of strategic relevance, and worthy of protection.”  
  
_I don’t wager against the house,_ Dankovsky almost says aloud. “Only prospective?”  
  
Tench shrugs, as distant as the peeking building tops in town. “Military base is almost empty, not to mention the infrequency of trains.”  
  
Dankovsky thinks of the otherworldly specimen samples shipped on ice to his pathology lab from the front lines: blisters filled with black blood, tongues swollen twice their size, sightless greyed eyeballs.  
  
Tench is still idly justifying himself. “There’s a lot of things that could have disqualified the mine’s output. Inefficiency in testing, prohibitive cost, shortage of some other reagent necessary for the weapon. Or it might just have been too noxious; one of the key properties of chemical warfare agents is that they must be fast dispersing. Otherwise, you’ve salted the earth and poisoned the wells of your new territory.” He’s still staring across the apocalyptic heave of mountainsides. “The laboratory is the first room on your left. You should get set up for when Fyordorov returns.”  
  
“I’ll get started. You don’t need three men to conduct an autopsy.”  
  
“We won’t be participating; we’ll be observing.”  
  
“You can read my notes. I won’t miss anything,” Dankovsky says, stamping on his cigarette butt for punctuation.  
  
Agent Tench doesn’t stop him, which feels like permission.

  
  


  
  
The room has two half-reclined metal chairs hung about with unfastened straps, an opaque white crust around the uncushioned headrest. The black tiles underfoot slope towards a drain grate. Beyond that, a body rests upon one large autopsy slab. It is seemingly mummified within a not-quite-white sheet, bound closed in odd, half-woven patterns with brown wool. The other is on a low, wheeled gurney, wrapped similarly. The room smells of mopwater and the subtle frisson of frozen flesh.  
  
There’s a water pump, a sponge, and a chipped enamel bowl. Daniil opens his doctor’s bag enough to pull free a pair of rigorously whetted fabric shears (for when the deceased show up fully clothed) and his notebook. He begins to pull his thin leather gloves off; he’s never had Burakh’s finesse, for all his additional academic understanding of anatomy, and the gloves will only compound that. He’d prefer to do delicate work bare-fingered, when there’s no plague raging.  
  
It’s not the scalpel he reaches for now, but his ebony fountain pen. The pathologist sketches the wrappings, and the lines of goat-wool thread to better distinguish antemortem ligature marks from postmortem. Satisfied, he snips open the wool, and peels away the funeral shrouds.  
  
The body on the slab is the woman. The one on the gurney is the man.  
  
He saw the crime scene photographs of the two bodies: untangled, strewn about, exhibited. They are much in one place now; everything internal has been piled back in, like a child’s idea of a medical procedure. There’s some desiccated steppe herbs amongst the frozen organs. The woman is not as mutilated as the man: it seems all that was surgically extracted were her eyes (not found at the crime scene) and a lobe of her liver (found resting in her own hand).  
  
Dankovsky opens to a fresh page to sketch the body outlines, and then turns his exquisite attention to his new acquaintances.

  
  


  
  
“Any injection sites?” comes Fyordorov’s voice as if from the other side of thick glass.  
  
Daniil shakes away the narrow attention of a line of sculpturally smooth incisions beneath his magnifying glass and turns to regard the two men now camped out beside the restraint-laden chairs. Fyordorov is sitting in one, untethered, working through a thick book. The title is ‘Ethnological Study of Nomadic and Settled People within the East Expanded Territory’, and Dankovsky can’t make out the much smaller text beneath that must be the author’s name. Tench has found a wooden stool somewhere, and is half-heartedly filling in paperwork against his briefcase, reading glasses on his nose.  
  
“No.” Daniil can see his own opaque warmth escaping with the single word. The frozen corpses are chilling the air around them. “The cloth wrapping, was that some kind of funeral rites?”  
  
“The locals said they had to be covered, if we wanted to store them in the old crypts. And the stone structures are only partially enclosed, so the weather was a concern; we commissioned a weaver to enshroud the corpses tightly,” Fyordorov explains. He threads the ribbon bookmark into the open page and sets the book in his lap. Daniil cannot ascertain from his disposition whether his camera could be repaired; he pettily hopes not. The agent continues, “I couldn’t see bruising around the nose, the type you’d expect for a cloth rag soaked in sedative. I suppose that leaves the examination of their stomach. He could have offered them food or drink.”  
  
Dankovsky re-examines both noses, lips. No contusions, and no fresh abrasions, though it’s hard to tell beneath the inflamed skin. “...I’ve seen these sort of pustules and peeling before, on a woman in town. I can’t palpate organs, obviously, but visually the torso shapes of this woman points to inflammation of the liver, or perhaps the gallbladder. There’s a distinct asymmetry.”  
  
“The mine,” Tench and Fyordorov say in unison.

“The notes you gave me said this woman worked as an acrobat in--”  
  
“Everyone gets sick from it,” Tench says with a sigh. “Not just workers.” It’s uncannily close to a political statement, something Dankovsky knows better than to expect from government operatives.  
  
Dankovsky pulls upright and puts away the magnifying glass. He pours fresh water over his hands, lathers them with soap, even though he didn’t start the dissection. “Well, that’s all I can do for now. They’ll need days to defrost before I can open them up.”  
  
“... _days_ ? Are you serious?” Tench asks. “We’ll raise the room temperature, then. We don’t have days.”  
  
“Any warmer and there will be tissue decay before the internal organs have even defrosted,” Daniil says, cleaning carefully beneath his nails, not looking up. “Don’t raise the temperature. You’ll either cook them or rot them.”  
  
“What if he’s killed again before the week’s out?” Tench asks, scowling.  
  
Daniil pats his hands dry before he pulls his gloves on. “The cause of death is pretty apparent: major, life-sustaining organs were found violently removed from their bodies. I don’t know what could be forensically pertinent that you’re expecting from a full autopsy.”  
  
“But they weren't violent. They were peaceful: there’s no defensive wounds; there was no sound of struggle in either case,” Fyordorov says. “Hence, the search for injection sites. He neutralises them somehow.”  
  
“If I don’t figure out what symptoms are related to chronic poisoning, I’ll be able to discern very little from an autopsy. If, as you suspect, the killer is drugging them before--”  
  
“‘The killer’?” Fyordorov echoes, an eyebrow raising. “You mean, if Burakh is drugging them?”

Daniil performs a slate-blank, obedient nod. “Of course, Agent. If Burakh is drugging them, then we’ll know he has access to pharmaceutical sedatives; in short, you’ll have ascertained that he’s a surgeon. My time is better spent elsewhere.”  
  
“Mhm. I’m sure such a learned man has plenty to offer besides pathological insight,” Fyordorov says. There’s a nasty, trialling glint in his eye.  
  
His camera was definitely irreparable. Dankovsky turns to pack his bag. “Do you know of any physicians in residence here? There might be medical records for the victims-- if they sought treatment for chronic poisoning.”  
  
“No real doctors, as far as I know. People wait and catch the train inland if they need very complex treatments. There’s a sister at the church who trained as a nurse,” the younger agent says. “I think she does midwifery, sets broken bones, that sort of thing.”  
  
Tench speaks without looking up from his paperwork. “There’s a chemist in town. A scientist, like yourself. She’s studying the mine’s contamination, but she might not want to talk to you.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“She didn’t want to talk to us,” Tench clarifies.  
  
_Why did you want to talk to her?_ Not for the first time, Dankovsky feels deliberately misdirected. He folds away the preliminary, black-ink autopsy illustrations inside his notebook.  
  
“You have to be very careful,” comes Fyordorov’s voice, disconcertingly close.  
  
“Excuse me?” Daniil asks icily, glaring out of the corner of his eye.  
  
Fyordorov has crossed the room to stand less than a foot away. “Shaving without a mirror. ...you’re bleeding, Doctor.”  
  
Daniil almost retreats, though pride disallows that manoeuvre. The proximity is seemingly thoughtless, however uncomfortable. Daniil raises gloved fingers to the cut.  
  
“Burakh was seen this morning by a local woman, on his way down the mountain,” Fyordorov adds, unblinking. “You’ll want a weapon.”  
  
Not an accusation, but a dangerous insinuation. Dankovsky sidelines the subtext and wordlessly opens his buttoned coat, reaches to his right hip for the holstered revolver. He draws the gun with a warning smile.  
  
Tench is watching over his reading glasses.  
  
Fyordorov doesn’t flinch from the deadly weapon between them. “Good, good. It would be a great pity to lose a mind like yours because of a violent lunatic.”


	4. Chapter 4

Daniil decides to start with the chemist for two reasons: he hates nuns, and the Behaviorists apparent interest in the mine has now piqued his own. He’s hungry, but has rye bread tied up in a handkerchief in his bag and currency that has yet to catastrophically devalue. Besides, the clinging scent of cadaver hasn’t quite loosened with the sea breeze. He finds the filigreed wooden cottage at the edge of town using Tench’s hand-sketched directions (cleanly drawn, of course-- maps are sacrosanct to army men), and knocks hard on the door.  
  
The girl who pulls in the door is not old enough to have studied chemistry, or anything so useful-- maybe something simple, like poetry or chess.  
  
He recognises her at once: the eccentric apprentice undertaker who wanted to know about thanatology, while he’d been dead on his feet trying to find Rubin. He’d tried Isidor Burakh’s grave, and Lara Ravel’s home, and that awful theatre-cum-hospital-cum-morgue, before it even occurred to him to check the man’s own bed. After the Sand Pest, one of the Stamatins took her in, he thinks. (He’d been nursing a splitting twyrine headache, trying to pack his filthy belongings, when Eva had brought it up.)  
  
“What are you doing here?” he asks, then decides he should have begun with a more polite greeting.  
  
She looks sinewy and light-starved, but perhaps she always did. She’s leaning on the doorframe like a post-noon drunk. Mammalian proportions, but the brittle, near-translucent skin of a lineage too many generations underground. She’s swathed in a huge red shawl in the local weaver’s style, multi-tasselled and thick as winter bedding. “Clara is helping me find the murderers of Khan and Capella. She knew where to go.”  
  
“Where is she?”  
  
Grace (he _thinks_ ) shrugs limply, and it seems enough effort to half-kill her.  
  
“How did you get to town?” Daniil asks, folding his arms disapprovingly.  
  
“We took a train to the coast, sitting with all the meat. Then a boat.”  
  
“You travelled so far in this condition to offer what, exactly?”  
  
“The voice of victimhood. Otherwise they have nobody to speak for them.”  
  
“A voice that apparently speaks only in riddles,” Daniil says. “I’m here to see the chemist.”  
  
“I’ll take you to her,” Grace says, stepping back unsteadily.  
  
Daniil catches her elbow, grimacing. “You could just tell me where-- fine.” It can’t be far, not in a cottage of these proportions.  
  
It’s barely ten steps into the plainly decorated house-- ten slow steps, supporting the cocooned girl along. The woman has her back turned, engrossed in a row of vials. Her desk is where a kitchen ought to be, shelves high with brown and white glass bottles and beakers and bell jars. On a tripod, over a single-flame gas burner, sits what appears to be a kitchen saucepan.  
  
“Irina,” Grace says.  
  
The chemist startles as if from a beguiling dream.  
  
Daniil helps the infirm child onto a sofa, then straightens. He orders his neckband (no pin, that went to the pawnbroker several months back) and turns to the chemist. “The girl let me in.” He meant to sound unapologetic and purposeful, but didn’t quite manage.  
  
“Irina Vishnevskaya, of the Natural Science Consortium,” she greets. She is a tall woman, in perhaps her late thirties. Her hair, parted so straight it might have been set with a ruler, is blonde or red or somewhere between. Her brown eyes are heavy with lashes and not at all greyed with poison.  
  
“Doctor Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine. I’m the pathologist examining the murder victims.”  
  
“I see. I can’t be of assistance to you. I know nothing about this case,” she says. It’s not stammered out nervously, nor a brusque dismissal. It is a fact supplied fully set and steady; her speaking voice could be carved granite.

“I’m here to ask about poisoning from the mine. I’d like to understand the chemical process better; both victims showed blistering on their faces, and I think some internal organs may be engorged.”  
  
She studies him, nods. “Okay. That I can help you with. Sit down.”

Grace’s hand catches his sleeve as he begins to step away from her. “The locals say we walk through time facing backwards; we can see the past, but not our future. Is that true, Doctor?”  
  
“The locals are also frightened of mirrors. Their wisdom isn’t worth ruminating upon,” Daniil says, pulling away and taking the only empty chair.  
  
The chemist laughs-- an inoffensive, merry sound. “They’re not frightened of them.”  
  
“I heard they banned them,” Daniil says, chagrined.  
  
She only smiles this time. “They have. Someone smashed my microscope only last month. But it is a political act, not superstition. They know the mine is poisoning them, and they are protesting it. Nowadays nearly all the metal extracted goes into making mirrors. Though, the ban is misguided in its own way; the mirrors made with the mine’s metals aren’t the kind you’d find atop a dresser or in a powder case. They produce flawless reflections. Used in astrological, concave mirrors for amplifying celestial bodies, and in scientific experimentation. One physicist claimed that a mirror of high enough quality could reflect light before it arrived-- disrupting the trajectory of time’s arrow itself.”

Grace’s eyes are wide. “Maybe you _can_ disrupt the direction of time, if you see clearly enough. Sometimes it seems to me that Clara is walking the wrong way. She sees everything ahead and nothing behind.”  
  
Daniil ignores the child, leans in. “Do you mean Doctor Klopsky’s series of experiments in temporal displacement of reflected waves?”  
  
Irina Vishnevskaya looks disapproving at once. “You said you were a pathologist.”  
  
“I achieved a Bachelor of Medicine, but my previous study was thanatological. Accordingly, time is of great relevance to--”  
  
She sighs heavily. “Do you think most people can fully understand your work?”  
  
“I don’t know if _I_ can fully understand my work.”  
  
“And you might never. There is no reason to suppose that the physical properties of the world would confine themselves to what humankind can conceptualize.”  
  
“I’m no positivist,” Daniil interjects.  
  
“This is why nobody should seek expertise in all things. It is hard enough to understand one thing to a useful depth; dedication and fine specialization are humanity’s only tinder in a dark abyss of ignorance.”  
  
“There’s no reason to suppose an initial approach is correct. Intellect is also agility and discernment. If the solution comes from an area of study you are unfamiliar with, and you refuse to expand your horizons, then you’re condemned to failure.”  
  
“That is your duty.”

“Is spending one’s life on failure useful?”  
  
“There is much that may be proved through failure. That is light into the abyss. ...look at this,” she says, reaching behind. She’s holding a wire-and-wood molecular model, painted red and grey and green. “This is the chemical structure formed when a chlorine ion bonds with metal. I do not understand the chlorine, nor the metal, nor the atoms that comprise it. But I understand this structure fully.” Irina says the last sentence with clarity, with euphoria.

Daniil feels moved to tears-- jealous, bitter tears. He isn’t, of course. He hasn’t wept since childhood. “I’m not willing to put on blinders in service of a pure scientific collective. Perhaps that’s selfish of me.”  
  
“It is.”

“Well, that I might add greater scope to my dilettantism, may I ask how the metals from the mine are responsible for the ill health of--” a moment of intense light-headedness distracts him for a beat, “--townsfolk who don’t work in the mine. Does it leach into the water supply?” He sits down, pulling the slightly stale rye bread from his bag and unwrapping the handkerchief. “Excuse me.”  
  
“I have fisherman’s soup on the stove, if you’re hungry.”  
  
Daniil doesn’t turn down food any more. He stows the bread away.

  
  
The stove turns out to be the bunsen burner on her work desk, though her skin and eyes are clear enough that Daniil discounts the threat of cross-contamination. He is so hungry that her cooking skills seem consummate.  
  
While he eats, she rhapsodizes about her narrow area of study. Three heavy metals being mined, two which are prone to forming highly toxic ionic compounds. Her communication leaves much to be desired; Irina seems chronically unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, attempting to convey every minute detail. She has diligent records of townsfolk with symptoms, though Daniil can only find the circus girl’s (the miners are apparently discouraged from disclosing their own maladies)-- but she refuses to discuss a secondary effect until she deems her underlying knowledge base exhausted.  
  
Daniil thinks about the experimentation chamber in the fort, and wonders if Irina herself conducted the tests, or if it was a different scientific zealot. That’s what she is, of course, and he respects it immensely. He can well imagine a dispassionate marriage; Irina with her work, he with his, the scantest marital contact. No prying questions about his home life from colleagues ever again. Perhaps that’s his age getting to him.  
  
She is explaining the biological uptake of metal ions when the door sounds. She jerks upright, again as if waking. “That will be Clara. I offered the two girls a place to stay; she believes she can cure the afflicted.”  
  
It is the same sort of non-sentimental kindness as the offer of food. Perhaps Irina was brought up too well. “You believe in her miracles?” Daniil asks, not bothering to hide his disappointed.  
  
“I do not give myself over to questions of what is, and isn’t possible. I concern myself with observable phenomena. I waste no time on what is beyond me.”  
  
“I would have expected no less of you,” he mutters, biting through a rather overcooked potato. He turns on the arriving figure-- drowned in an oversized, undoubtedly ill-gotten overcoat. The same hat, though. The same arrogant glint in her blue eyes.  
  
“I knew you’d be here,” Clara announces.  
  
“Let me guess, a witnessless prediction you are going to claim as fulfilled?”  
  
“No. Our very own Haruspex told me, when I caught him cowering behind the circus tent this morning. He wants to speak with you, something about herbs. He seemed to think you’d be of help to him. I told him, I doubt it. You do anything only to your own ends.”  
  
“You _doubt_ it? Some soothsayer you are.”  
  
“I _doubt_ you’re important enough to merit visions.”  
  
“I don’t have time to bicker with a child,” Dankovsky says, turning back to Irina, and to his half-finished soup. “You were telling me about the biological accumulation of dense metals, in, ah--”  
  
“Oh, yes. In the algae, I believe. Then algae is eaten by fish. They are full of the ions. People figured out that the ocean was poisoning them very quickly. The poorer townsfolk continue to fish, though they usually head at least two or three miles from the Port. That results in a slower, more painful death.”  
  
Daniil stops chewing.  
  
“It’s freshwater salmon, idiot,” Clara says from where she is sitting atop a countertop, grinning like a demon. Her legs swing like industrial pitons, dangerously close to all the precious glassware.

The Bachelor rolls his eyes, swallows, attention reluctantly returning to the Changeling. “So. Why are you here?”  
  
“Solving the murders.”  
  
“You think some illiterate waif starved to the point of delusion is going to help you find a mass killer?”  
  
Clara’s eyes flit to Grace, catatonic on the small sofa. “Grace already spoke to Khan and Capella, the day they were murdered. They were calling out to her, they wanted revenge. If I hadn’t arrived on the train and rushed to the graveyard to heal her, she’d be dead now.”  
  
“I’d call it a folie à deux, except that you were both quite out of your minds without the other.”  
  
She ignores that. “I tried to heal a man at the circus who had scabs all over his hands. I made his skin better, but I felt it within him. Like a knot, or a nub, a catch. The poison is still in there, and it will kill him in the end. The Haruspex thinks we can get it out of the blood.”

“With herbs and tinctures and tribal wisdom?”  
  
Irina’s confusion seems to resolve. “Doctor Burakh--” _(“He’s not a real doctor,” Daniil almost says.)_ “--came to ask me about binding agents. He sought much the same information as you, Dankovsky: patient presentations and fatality statistics.”  
  
“Then, let me trespass against you no further. Burakh will have compiled the information relevant to my medical field, and his time is far less academically valuable than yours.”  
  
Irina seems a touch put out. She closes her notebook. “Don’t waste too many of your years of study, Doctor. They’re more limited than you think.”  
  
“I have no doubt of that. Thank you for the soup. Meeting you was a pleasure.”

  
  
He’s halfway to the tattered circus tent when he realizes he’s being followed. Not the Behaviorists, or some underling acting as a spy, but Clara in her huge, fatigue green overcoat.  
  
“You have an acrobat’s poise. Hm, perhaps acrobat isn’t quite right. A practised burglar? I wonder where you learned that,” Daniil says snidely, trying to keep his eyes averted as he speaks.  
  
“Have you wondered why the suits hired you? Of all the pathoanatomists?”  
  
“ _Pathologists._ Don’t try to learn medical jargon from Rubin, you’ll only embarrass yourself. And, no, I just walk around with my mind slate blank, waiting for some smartass kid to come along and enlighten me.”  
  
She doesn’t reply to that, but keeps following him.  
  
“So, you didn’t predict the bloody rampage before it started?” he asks, with a testy glance over his shoulder.  
  
“I did. But I was away on a pilgrimage. I wanted to restore my powers to what they had been before the Sand Pest depleted me.”  
  
“A pilgrimage to where?”  
  
“To the warfront. To a town where the people are all beneath the turf in mass graves. I saw the grave dug when I was young.”  
  
Daniil’s eyes start to widen, until he realizes the obnoxious child is no doubt lying through her teeth. “Ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Do you feel very saintly, now?”  
  
“I feel myself again. He’s not behind the circus tent any more, by the way.”  
  
Daniil stops in his tracks, grimacing at the looming mass of canvas and guy ropes. _Couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?_ “...where is he, then?”  
  
Clara shrugs belligerently. “I only know where he isn’t. ...I think I saw him walking towards the junkyard.”

“I’d like a more accurate bearing than that, before I waste my day traipsing around looking for Burakh. You, girl, have you seen a tall man with a--” Daniil trails off as the long-haired, willowy man looks up in his direction. His freckled snub-nose and pointy cupid’s bow look very familiar. Surely not another traveller from-- then Daniil’s thoughts reach a vertiginous, certain dead end. 

That twinge of familiarity is from the thawing circus performer; and this attentive young man must be a relative of the victim, with all their facial similarities. He’s dressed like a performer too, in patterned tights and a loose tunic shirt.

“Pardon me.” Dankovsky walks off without another word, hoping he’s pointed in the general direction of the junkyard. He can’t stand those messy conversations.  
  
Behind him, he hears the man greet Clara by the wrong name-- she seems unperturbed, answers too silkily. A good liar; you have to be, if you want to achieve sainthood.

  
  
  
He hurries the cobbled, salt-licked port road, ducking away from every askance look from dockworkers and fishermen and yellow-eyed gulls. There’s a rough wooden stairway down to a bank of oil-fouled sand, but the beach provides pleasant isolation much in the same homely way that his pathology lab does.  
  
The pebble-studded sand clings to the scuffed tips of his boots as he marches down the beach towards the junkyard. He had been intending to replace his work shoes for months, but the noose of destitution was never sufficiently lax.

As he walks into the greying afternoon, he worries about the Changeling’s arrival in town and what it might portend (as if he’s back in that deprived twyre bloom hysteria), then about Irina’s unwillingness to speak with Agent Tench. He decides that she most likely deemed him too stupid to waste knowledge on; she doesn’t seem the type to resent authority-- or even take a particular stance upon it. His thoughts, finally, land upon Agent Fyordorov’s almost paternal warning.  
  
The agents know more than they’re letting on; they invited him here for more than just pathology. Are they trying to lure Burakh out into the open? Why such an odd angle of approach? There’s more, there must be. The mine connects to chemical warfare which connects to the army which connects back to Tench-- the half formed thought is displaced by a figure lurking at the edges of his vision. He squints through the spray haze of low, gurgling waves and then hurries towards Artemy Burakh, almost missing a second figure behind him.  
  
The second person is a very old man in old furs and a bright, embroidered hat. Daniil sees no sign of poison on his skin, except that venon of mortality that all the elderly are steeped in. They are standing in the squelching low tide mud, and Burakh appears to be spreading fish offcuts onto the beach. Further up, amongst the sparse dune grass, is a clandestine cluster of stone figures and an arched gateway into the junkyard.  
  
“You wanted to talk to me? About herbs,” Daniil clarifies, avoiding looking inside the tin bucket Artemy is carrying. Only one sense spared; the heavily fermented, cloying scent is inescapable this close.  
  
“Didn’t think you cared about getting your hands dirty, erdem,” Burakh says, hefting another handful-- sprat heads, guts, an unavoidable sensory furor of long decay.  
  
“I don’t mind getting my hands dirty for a good cause. Whatever the hell you’re doing undoubtedly doesn’t qualify.”  
  
The old man faces him, now, and Daniil finally sees that his iris and pupil are whitened and sightless with poison. “We trick the tide up the beach with bait, then we scare them down the beach with heated pebbles.”  
  
“I’m very grateful that you’ve kept the tidal cycle going single-handedly,” Daniil says sarcastically.  
  
Burakh glares even more than usual.  
  
The old man seems to miss any intended insult. “The tide will misbehave if you do not herd it where it should go. Like ima. The ocean will ripple and roil and become unclean. If sar-- the moon-- cannot see himself, he sends storms,” he says, gesturing to the sky and wildly missing the crescent moon.  
  
“So a celestial body sends bad weather in response to agitated water? Not that storms create waves?”  
  
The old man treats his question as absolutely benign. “He sends bad weather, yes.”  
  
“And those… statues, those are your handiwork?”  
  
“They are for the dead, as an example. If you do not teach the dead to silently watch, the living know no peace.”  
  
“...do you have something to say to me, Burakh?” Daniil asks, coolly. “I should start the trek back, if this was just a child’s prank.”  
  
“I do want to speak with you,” Burakh says. He sets down the bucket, then paces away to wash his hands in the ocean water. He’s still drying them when he approaches Daniil, who loiters several paces from the old man so as to discourage further conversation.  
  
“You’re not worried he’ll sell you out for the offered reward?” Daniil asks. “Shamans love money like misers, in my experience.”  
  
“He hasn’t seen the wanted posters. He can’t see. As far as he knows, I’m a travelling doctor.”  
  
Daniil frowns. “Your funeral. Actually, as a convicted murderer, you’ll probably be buried without one. Now, what about the herbs?”  
  
“Was the swevery cut, or uprooted?”  
  
“I-- I’m not sure. Is it important?”  
  
“Maybe it grew there. If blood is spilled, and there was a body, twyre grows… the earth is a kind of body, or at least, it was.”  
  
“The Behaviorists photographed the miner’s body hours after the murder. It wasn’t seedlings, it was the flowered plant.”  
  
“Our herbs grow fast, with enough blood.”  
  
“When I resume the autopsy, I’ll look for roots," Daniil agrees, though he doesn't follow Burakh's line of investigation. "Now, I went to see the chemist, and I’d prefer not to retread ground if you’re doing your own research.”  
  
“ _Already?_ I hoped that this many murders might hold your attention a little longer, oynon.”  
  
“This was about the murders, Burakh. The Behaviorists want me to find out if the victims were drugged or poisoned, which means figuring out which poison was always in their system. ...what else would I be seeing Irina about?”  
  
Burakh looks away. “Vishnevskaya had notes on an alchemist who lived in town some thirty years ago. He believed he could use the chemicals from the mine to stop the ageing process.”  
  
Daniil feels a giddiness he has not since the stories of Simon Kain’s longevity. “I see. What was his name?”  
  
“People are being murdered, Dankovsky.”  
  
“This must be related. I knew the Behaviorists summoned me for more than just autopsies.”  
  
“I don’t remember his name,” Burakh says, which is probably a lie.  
  
“Did his experiments succeed?”  
  
“Maybe, maybe not. His elixir didn’t have any prophylactic properties against a bullet to the head.”  
  
“...the alchemist was shot?”  
  
Artemy nods dismissively. “Do you have any food? The shops all have wanted posters pinned at the entries. The Behaviorists are trying to starve me out.”  
  
Daniil pulls out the rye bread. “Do you remember his name?” he asks, even though he could simply go back to Irina.  
  
Burakh’s eyes follow the food with the twitching obviousness of a stray dog. “He went by the name Devin.” He takes the rye bread like thirty pieces of silver.  
  
Dankovsky hasn’t heard the name before, but that’s no surprise, given the remoteness of the town and man’s untimely demise. But unproductive scientists don't usually get shot-- they tend to starve to death. No, somebody killed him, perhaps for his knowledge. The wind from the south is beginning to pick up and Daniil is with it in the air; absolutely, startlingly alive.


	5. Chapter 5

Daniil is so pleasantly absorbed in his own intellect, he hardly notices that Artemy is following him back to town. He stops in his tracks, makes a conscious effort to externalize. “So, the poisoning symptoms,” he indulges.   
  
“I’m too tired to give you good answers, but I can hand over my notes. I wrote down everything as a contingency. If I’m executed, Avrelian can take them to a doctor inland and try to solicit help.”   
  
“Avrelian? A physician…?”   
  
Artemy smiles grimly. “A tightrope walker. Brother to one of the murder victims. But he trusts my innocence; his sister was scared of all men other than him. She would never have been alone with me.”   
  
Daniil glances back towards the old man-- still distributing the rotten fish along the tide line in the ebbing twilight. The sun is tilting westward, obscured by cloud cover. It seems too early, but who is he to argue with a star? “So, what does a shaman with less grasp of cause and effect than an infant have to offer?”   
  
“I have seen fantastical things with my own eyes, oynon. As have you.”   
  
“I have seen feats of human ingenuity. They were not fantastical. They were devised, constructed, and very real.”   
  
“I’m not talking about the Polyhedron,” Burakh says, effectively putting a stop to the conversation. But the Haruspex must be working off a different script to him, because he continues on: “He wanted help with his daily rite. He’s answering my questions about the town’s history. It seemed fair.”   
  
“...questions about the alchemist?”   
  
Burakh doesn’t hide his eye roll. “A lot older than that. None of the tribes lived in this bay; the folklore went that the dead congregated here to gossip. The dead should be silent, and the living approaching would only encourage them to talk more.”   
  
Daniil shudders, but hides it well. 

A wave carves up the streaked shoreline, and Dankovsky beelines towards the dunes to avoid it. It washes over Burakh’s heavy boots, and he seems unconcerned.   


The Bachelor breaks the silence again. “Folk history is all very well, but I’m still not up to date on recent, real events. Do you know anything about the Behaviorists? With how well they know you and I, it might be prudent to reach more level footing.”   
  
“Lara knew of Tench. He was a lieutenant general, fought on the Western Front, then was stationed overseeing a-- ah, I think they call them ‘reclaimed territories’, now-- in essence, an occupied town during peacetime, or at least, a more peaceful interlude. This was maybe fifteen years ago.”   
  
“High rank at that age, no?” Dankovsky asks, basking in internal congratulation of own instincts. He’s half-tempted to digress into Burakh’s own experiences of war. “A man in Block’s mold, then.”   
  
Artemy makes a disputing hum. “Someone was attacking the local women. Masked rapes that escalated to strangulations. There were guerillas who would make raids from the mountains. His superiors expected him to shuffle some papers around, and then accuse the rebel faction-- in order to turn public opinion.”   
  
“Ah. What did Lieutenant General Tench do instead?”   
  
“Conducted a real investigation, spoke to the earlier victims that weren’t killed, even learned the local dialect. Some rumors had him meeting with the guerillas leaders underneath a white flag. He brought his conclusion to his superiors: the crimes were committed by one of their own men. A decorated serviceman-- and also a Lieutenant General.”   
  
“And Tench wasn’t court-martialled on the spot?” Daniil asks.   
  
“They found a cigar case containing several of the victims’ wedding bands in the accused’s effects. He’d signed up for service with a fake name; his real identity, a convicted rapist, was quickly ascertained.”   
  
“I’m surprised he even bothered with a fake name. They take just about anyone, don’t they?”   
  
Artemy seems to take offence to that. He’s silent for several trudging steps, then, “Apparently, the propaganda office was considering making a radio play out of the whole affair. Showcase the honor and integrity with which our army operates. It hit an inevitable stumbling block: the murderer was also ranked army personnel. Lieutenant General Tench became Agent Tench to put his investigative talents to better use.”   
  
“No surprises that he was transferred post haste. A critical thinker is ill-fitted to the army. They’d probably prefer a murderous rapist.”   
  
“He shouldn’t be underestimated,” Artemy says very seriously.   
  
“What about his partner?”   
  
“He shouldn’t be underestimated either.”   
  
“I mean, did anyone know the name Fyordorov?”   
  
“Some people had heard his name; it made the papers when the Behaviorists caught the Dulga Dismemberer last year.”   
  
“Oh,” Daniil says, at last piecing together where he first heard of the Behaviourists. Hacked up body parts butting up against scenic river barges. Cryptic letters full of impossible demands sent to politicians and printing presses. The killer, they’d said, had gained gratification from the social hysteria.    
  
“But you’re really asking whether anyone had information on his background. And nobody knew a damn thing about Fyordorov,” Burakh elaborates. “He’s good at getting people talking. If a second Inquisitor had arrived in Town-On-Gorkhon, there would have been panic. Instead, there was complacency, especially amongst the powerful. Everyone thought they’d retain their secrets awhile yet. They didn’t. I saw those notes in your cabin; the Kin spoke to him, an outsider, generously and truthfully. I don’t know how he made that happen.”   
  
“He doesn’t  _ seem _ particularly socially gifted.”   
  
Artemy shrugs. He’s speaking in a hushed voice now, as they pass the first outskirts of the town. “We still haven’t met. Hopefully, never will.”   
  
“And this Inquisitor? Wendy Kahr, Tench said.”   
  
“A contemporary of Aglaya. Another student of Inquisitor Orff. Kahr ceased Inquisitorial duties perhaps ten years ago, and has been in academia until a very recent return to state service. She has an advanced degree in something psychological.”   
  
“I wonder if we’ve met.”   
  
“You don’t know?”   
  
“I met a lot of people, Burakh. We may have crossed paths at a conference. Maybe a black tie dinner party. I did occasionally attend those, when trying to solicit funding. I wouldn’t have had much cause to speak with her; until Simon Kain, I’d never even considered the mind, human will, to have any thanatological relevance. I’d been under the mistaken impression that all people sought to defy their own oblivion,” Daniil says quietly. They’ve reached the outskirts of town; even though the houses are closed up and alight from inside, and the twilight has faded beyond easy recognition, he’d rather not draw attention.   
  
“What do you think now?”   
  
“That some people are perfectly happy to go to their death, if they feel it’s what’s expected of them. Predictability over all else. How many people died of the plague because they insisted upon continuing their political struggles, or refused to heed medical advice, or simply insisted on doing their normal daily chores about town? Half the soldiers didn’t mutiny, dedicated to staying in that deathtrap town.”   
  
“I don’t recall you trying to escape the quarantine.”   
  
“Nor you,” Daniil replies sardonically.   
  
“It’s my hometown. You were just a good doctor,” Burakh says, uninflected.   
  
Dankovsky feels the tiniest pinprick of pride, though that sensation fades amongst a cacophony of self-loathing retorts he doesn’t voice. _ I didn’t make a cure. I didn’t save that which duty dictated I preserve. I didn’t figure out Kain’s secrets of longevity. _   
  
“You don’t need to brood. I’m not making a joke at your expense, I’m--  _ shudkher _ ,” Artemy cuts himself off, backing up and pressing into the wall of an alleyway.   
  
Daniil does the same instinctively, though he’s trying to follow Burakh’s eyes. The empty marketplace, the port of dark stationed boats, and-- “The Inquisitor,” he says softly, of the brightly lit steam boat that is pulled into the port. A gangplank is being extended, towards the waiting figures-- Fyordorov holding a lantern in hand and Tench dragging on a cigarette. Kahr is wearing a beige duster, with fur trim around the skirt and around the raised hood. Her face is hidden by the drawn hood as she strides down the gangplank, small suitcase in hand. She stops halfway, begins to look around. Daniil withdraws until line-of-sight is severed, catching only the suggestion of high cheekbones and steely composure.   
  
Artemy is beside him, frown visible even in the blue darkness. “Are you going to go see her?” he asks, in a bass whisper.   
  
“Tomorrow, I believe,” Daniil mutters. “We can curve around and--”   
  
“We go through town our own separate ways. I’ll cross the port when she’s gone, and get my notes from the circus grounds. The fishermen want me to figure out a cure for this poison, so they’re not going to turn me in. You don’t slaughter the good milking cow. There must be a Latin idiom to that effect,” Artemy says, a little humour in his lowered voice. He sounds like a young man for a moment-- which he was not so long ago.   
  
“Perhaps someday you’ll go back to your studies and learn enough Latin to produce your own idioms at will.”

Artemy’s shape in the shadows becomes harsher angled, withdrawn.   
  
“I-- I mean, it’s a useless skill, really. A dead language. You don’t clearly don’t need additional training when it comes to your capacity to cure the sick,” Dankovsky adds, by way of apology.   
  
Artemy’s concern is plain, as he speaks. “You have to be careful with Lilich. She’ll want you to say too much.”   
  
“You mean Kahr.”   
  
“What?”   
  
“You said Lilich. You meant Kahr.”

Artemy doesn’t respond to that, scanning the port. “Go carefully, erdem.”   


Dankovsky avoids a few ominous dark figures lurking in alleyways, stops to buy canned food, then a second hand fur overcoat from the town’s pawnbroker (an asymmetrical black garment with hefty silver-toned buckles that he’s not entirely certain is menswear). He has a handful of loose change left afterwards, leaving his pockets lined with only the junk picked secretively out of bins and a handful of funicular tickets.   
  
He hands one such ticket over, waits five minutes in the darkness until the funicular begins to scale the mountainside. The otherwise empty car is a quarter way up the track, drawn by that string-thin thread, when a gunshot rings out across the bay. There’s a thunderous ricochet around the black cliff faces until it melds with the howling storm. But the sound came from down in town, he’s sure of it.   
  
At the upper funicular station, Daniil lingers indecisively and squints down at the flickering lights of the port town. He gets too cold and hurries away.

The cabin he returns to is unwelcoming and shuddering with the wind, but his new coat is impenetrable and the fire is quickly stoked to dull orange behind the cast iron grate. He finds himself pacing across the uneven floorboards as he awaits the Haruspex. He cannot help but recall the reward offered for Artemy’s corpse, though the exact amount escapes him.   
  
The Haruspex does not materialize. Daniil lights the lamp and tries to read his mind into subservience.

  
  
It’s most of an hour later when the key opens in the lock. Daniil bolts upright from the pages of Behaviorist research he’d been listlessly reviewing.   
  
Artemy Burakh steps into the cabin, smothered in clumps of snow, expression drawn.   
  
“I heard the gunshot. What happened?” Dankovsky asks at once.

The Haruspex shrugs as he pulls off his furred hat. “All the lights were on in the houses nearby, and I saw the Behaviorists. I couldn’t get any closer. ...I think it was the chemist’s house,” he says, cautiously.   
  
“You think, or you’re certain?” Daniil demands.   
  
“I didn’t get close enough to be exact.”   
  
“Why would anyone have a problem with a scientist?” the Bachelor asks, then answering his own question, “...who owns the mine?”   
  
“It was nationalized years ago. There’s a foreman, but I haven’t met him. Oynon, it might not be her.”   
  
“Dammit,” Dankovsky curses, pacing once again. “I should go down and check.”   
  
“You clearly need to sleep. There will be work to do in the morning. I brought fish, not for eating. And seawater. I’d like to know if the particles of metal have any unusual properties when they incorporate into living cells.”   
  
“Are you carrying a gun, Burakh?”   
  
Artemy brushes snow off his shoulders and doesn’t make eye contact. “Are you asking me if I killed Vishnevskaya?”   
  
“You didn’t want me asking about the alchemist. You insisted we go separate ways through town.”   
  
“I have a gun. No bullets. We don’t even know that a person was shot, let alone her,” Artemy lays out. “Go to bed. You’re losing your grip.”   
  
“Answer the goddamn question,” Daniil says, fingers sliding towards his holstered weapon.   
  
“I didn’t shoot the fucking chemist. Level that gun at me at me one more time, and I’ll break your hand,” Burakh growls.   
  
Daniil drops his hand away, though not out of fear; he’s quick on the draw, and Burakh just admitted he doesn’t have a loaded firearm on him. No, it’s that the Haruspex undoubtedly has more information on the alchemist, and training (albeit unscientific) in that area. He goes back to the erratic back-and-forth in the tiny cabin. “It wasn’t the murderer you’re hunting, that’s obvious. Why switch from arcane, exhibitionist displays to something so base and unimaginative?”   
  
Burakh is still squaring up to fight, and it takes a moment for his shoulders to roll down into a conversation-appropriate stance. “Clara and Grace are staying there; perhaps they know more.”   
  
Daniil nods stiffly. Marshalling himself to normalcy, he picks his still yet to be unloaded bag from the table. He’s steady enough stacking away the food into what must be considered shared storage. “If you’re going to expect food and shelter, you can pull your weight,” he says curtly, not looking back. “Fetch some more firewood, some kindling. There’s a woodshed around the back, and I think I saw an axe.”   
  
Burakh walks away.

Dankovsky is swift and decisive with vein selection this time, putting the syringe away with only a perfunctory clean. The rhythmic sound of splitting wood hasn’t let up yet. He’s not going to look like an addict in front of Burakh, especially not if the Haruspex is looking for levers to pull or buttons to press.   
  
Daniil settles into the barely warmed bedding wearing both coats, as Artemy comes back arms full of snow-dusted firewood. He stacks them in brittle silence without so much as a glance up.   
  
If Daniil didn’t know better, he’d say Artemy’s feelings were hurt. He rolls over to face the wall and tries to find a softer space in that analgesic void opening up around him. He finds somewhere in the middle of it that is soft like yolk.

  
  
Daniil Dankovsky, medical student, is waiting outside his professor’s office to ask to sit his third year practical exams during his second year-- in order to free up his study schedule for a post-graduate biophysics course. There’s an unerring determination settled around him, like plate armour or ivory plaster over an injury. 

Unfortunately, he’s not waiting alone in the imposing sandstone hallway. He tries to sidestep the other students, but is taken aback by the cursory glance. Why, these could be schoolchildren: a redhead girl in unconventional peasant wear, a boy styled as some kind of military-wannabe.   
  
“This really isn’t your business, and I don’t know why you’re getting involved,” the boy addresses him, blocking his way.   
  
Dankovsky is taken aback, but not cowed. “I assure you, I will make thanatology my business; I will attain mastery over this discipline in every meaning of the word. Now, aren’t you both far too young to be studying?”   
  
“Aren’t you?”   
  
“I’m sixteen, and I have special permits due to my superlative scores on standardized testing. Do you?”   
  
“Leave him alone, Khan. He doesn’t even know what’s going on,” the girl says.   
  
“I know precisely what is going on. Somebody sent you to sabotage me. They’re sending kids my way to take me down a peg-- imply I’m nothing special. But I am special.”   
  
The boy turns to the girl, letting out a very long sigh. “I didn’t realize he loosened up as he aged. This is unbearable. I’ve had more productive conversations with household furniture.”   
  
“We don’t need him. She’ll listen. Even if it kills her,” the redhead reassures.   
  
“She’ll listen to  _ you _ . ...like I listened to you, when you said together we could handle this,” the scowling boy says with a trace of bitterness.   
  
“Out of my way,” Daniil snaps, stepping past and putting his shoulder into the very heavy door.   
  
“I don’t blame you, you know. That you couldn’t do anything with my love,” the boy  _ (Khan, but where does he know that name from?)  _ adds. “It would be blaming a sieve for the water I poured through it.”   
  
The door clicks closed after Dankovsky and the conversation is cut mercifully short.   
  
He’s seen this office before, though he can’t recall the precise event that led him here. Professor Vishnevskaya sits at her desk, laden with beakers, test tubes. Behind her, the high Victorian windows are white with frost.   
  
“Sit, Dankovsky.”   
  
He does. “I was hoping to take a course on--”   
  
“You don’t have time. Listen to me.”   
  
“Actually, if I sit my third year exams at the end of this semester--” he tries, again.   
  
“Remember that abstraction is violence against the truth,” Vishnevskaya overrules. “This is the original sin for which humanity has forever been paying. The sin of conception, in an intellectual sense. Remember that; never forget it.”   
  
“One of the nuns at boarding school called me ‘Snake’ for asking too many questions. I was always rather proud of the monicker,” Daniil confides, then regrets it. This shouldn’t be personal.   
  
“You need to remember it alone, Dankovsky. I’m not there to set you straight.”   
  
“...you  _ are _ here.”   
  
“I’m not here. But I wasn’t done, do you hear me? I had years, still. I wasn’t done,” Irina says, panic entering her tone. Whites are showing around her dark brown eyes. Like the blackness at the center of the sun when you stare too long.   
  
Daniil bolts upright and collides with the wooden beam. He rubs his cheekbone, frantic, hyperventilating. He doesn’t remember what he dreamt of, he only remembers the last terrified expression on the face of Irina Vishnevskaya.   
  
“Dankovsky?” comes Artemy’s sleep-rough voice in the absolute darkness.   
  
Daniil retches, though it doesn’t make it past his tight throat. He swallows it like jagged, polluted sand. “She’s dead. I’m sure it’s her,” he whispers.   
  
“Go back to sleep,” comes Artemy’s somehow reasonable, steady voice.

“Why am I here?” Daniil asks raggedly. “What am I accomplishing here?”   
  
“Go back to sleep,” Artemy again insists.   
  
Daniil pretends to, but he’s sure his unsteady breathing reveals otherwise. He has lost control over his own diaphragm, like a scared child cowering from creaking floorboards.    
  
“Devin, the alchemist, made his elixir with minerals from the mine and herbal extracts,” the Haruspex says, from the floorboards of the cabin. It is completely dark, except for the faintest lick of orange escaping the stove. “I went looking for notes, recipes, but Vishnevskaya didn’t have them and didn’t know who might. You should ask the Behaviorists. I don’t know what local herbs he harvested, what processes he used for extraction; as far as I knew, my own father pioneered the use of distillation equipment like the alembic. Before then, the process involved macerating the herbs on special stones with fresh spring water. The Kin had no alcohol, except arkhiy-- a milk fermentation. There was no twyrine until after expansion. Besides, the herbs are too delicate to truly preserve with alcohol. Tywrine doesn’t have the medicinal properties of a water-based tincture.”   
  
“Why are you telling me this?” Daniil asks, finding his pulse righted, his mind on an even keel. What did Isidor Burakh’s tinctures do? Reveal symptoms?   
  
“Because I didn’t kill her. There’s no sky-shattering alchemical secrets I’m keeping from you. I didn’t want you getting obsessed and-- and leaving me to try to unravel this alone. Because I need your help, oynon.”

“...go to sleep, Artemy,” Daniil murmurs, rolling over into the now comforting warmth.

  
  
He wakes next because someone is pounding at the cabin’s door.   
  
Artemy is already wide awake, pressed to the wall beside the door in a low crouch. There’s nowhere to hide in this one-roomed cabin. He’s holding a sickle-like, delicate blade in his closed fist. He meets Daniil’s eyes, and puts a finger to his lips.

“Doctor Dankovsky?” comes Agent Tench’s rough rumble of a voice.   
  
There’s footsteps, muffled conversation. Daniil shrugs off the bedding, clambers down to creep across the floorboards, taking absolute attention to lay his feet along the sturdier joints of the rustic woodwork. He crouches beside Artemy.   
  
“Where is he, then?” Fyordorov is asking.   
  
“Shit, I don’t know. If you wanted to know where he was at all times, you should have placed him under house arrest.”   
  
“Or regular arrest,” Fyordorov mutters. “Maybe he’s already at the bridge, Bill.”   
  
Tench swears under his breath. “Leave a note, and let’s go.”   
  
There’s silence, then ascending footsteps. Daniil stops breathing again as a torn piece of notebook paper slides under the door. On it, Fyordorov’s now-familiar handwriting reads:   
  
‘Please make your way to the Hammer to speak with the Inquisitor, as soon as possible. Regards, Agent Fyordorov.’   
  
Then, footfalls down the wooden steps, a retreating crunching outside.   
  
Artemy puts away the blade.   
  
“Were you going to fight them? With that?” Daniil scoffs in a low voice.   
  
“Were you going to go easy?” Artemy returns, in a gravelly whisper.

  
  
  


Dankovsky boils water to wash, shave, then meticulously reorders himself for his appointment with an Inquisitor. Artemy leaves wordlessly, hat pulled low over his very recognisable face.   
  
The Bachelor doesn’t have time to make up slides and conduct a thorough analysis of the seawater or the fish, but he departs the cottage with Artemy’s notes on the mine’s contamination in his bag. That, he might have time to catch up on.   
  
He’s most of the way to the funicular when he changes direction, and begins to head in the general direction of the bridge he’s seen from below. The snowy gale lashes and claws ineffectually at his fur coat, though his ankles and ears sting with each new gust. Daniil loosens his neckband, and refastens it over his nose and ears, pulls the fur-covered collar right up around his nape and marches onward.   
  
There’s a crowd gathered at the edge of the precipice that the bridge spans, whispering fervidly about another murder. Dankovsky hasn’t been so close to this structure before; the proportions are now unavoidably bizarre, though Daniil feels revulsion, not wonder. It is a suspension bridge, supported by thick wires attached to crude, dark iron beams. The edges of the bridge are almost conventional, but the middle section-- hanging precipitously over a half-frozen spring rolling out of craggy mountain rocks-- is overburdened by heavy strats and inexplicable gluts of metal. Nobody is walking the bridge, but towards the middle are two standing figures, partially obscured by falling snow.   
  
Dankovsky sets off towards them, pulling the red scarf down off his nose. He’s most of the way to them when the two men (clearly Fyordorov and Tench, now he’s closed the distance) seem to notice his advance and start hurrying to intercept him.   
  
“Inquisitor Kahr is expecting you,” Fyordorov says abruptly, faux-politeness all evaporated. His hair is wind-blown and there are prominent blue-grey shadows beneath his darting eyes.   
  
Dankovsky looks behind them. Not Irina. A dark-haired, heftily-built man, face down. His ribs have been opened from behind, and Daniil can see into his lungs, or rather, where his lungs should be. The cavity is beginning to white with snow. “If I’m to autopsy this victim, observing the crime scene would be--”   
  
“The victim is not moving anywhere right now,” Tench interrupts. He’s trying to smoke a cigarette, though he has to keep cupping his hands over it to keep the red tip from extinguishing in the snowy wind. “And it’s too cold to degrade. Go see Wendy.”   
  
“I heard the chemist was shot,” Daniil says, though he hasn’t.   
  
“You can autopsy her too, after you’ve seen Inquisitor Kahr. Something to look forward to,” Fyordorov says, rather snidely.   
  
“What did you talk to Vishnevskaya about?” Tench asks, frowning momentarily at the younger agent. “When you went to ask her about symptoms?”   
  
Daniil shrugs. “Enlightenment. Epistemology. Fishing.”   
  
“Did she--”   
  
“Go see Kahr,” Fyordorov interjects, pulling his partner away by the shoulder.   
  
Tench must let himself be led, because there’s no way Fyordorov could move him against his will.   
  
_ So, the Behaviorists are withholding. Again. _ Daniil lights one of his own cigarettes as he walks away, for the warmth if nothing else. On the funicular he reads Artemy’s notes; commendable for their legibility, confirming both the blistered skin, and the engorged liver as pre-existing conditions, but still highly unsatisfactory. Nothing of thanatological significance, and Daniil is sure that’s what really matters.   
  
The town proper is abuzz, though whether because of the murders, or in spite of them, Daniil couldn’t say. He gauges what little information he can between hurried trades made with cold fingers, clumsy inside his leather gloves. Daniil found some fish hooks in the Upper Pritchell, but knowing what he does of the toxic fauna, he’s reluctant to hand them over to children. A half-used paper bag of birdseed, he parts with readily. He can barely work his jaw through the smoked goat jerky he receives back.   
  
The Hammer, he finds out, is the improbably elevated building in the center of the town. It had another name, once, but the townsfolk renamed it because it seemed perpetually threatening to come down. The Bachelor assumes nobody in town was literate enough to reference the sword of Damocles.   
  
He climbs the long staircase without much anxiety. The Behaviorists are clearly suspicious of him anyway; he’s not tarring his reputation if he remains evasive.   
  
He knocks on the heavy metal door, and a musical, cultured voice calls, “Come in”.   
  
Her hair is a precise bob, and she retains an equal strictness over her own facial features. She might be called pretty, if she carried herself less like a sheathed weapon. Kahr is wearing the same fur-lined coat, but it is open. Underneath is a boldly patterned blouse, a stiff velvet waistcoat, and a long black skirt. Well-dressed, for an academic. Or for an Inquisitor. She’s sitting at an exquisitely organized desk, pen poised.   
  
“Doctor Dankovsky,” Daniil announces, hanging his fur coat.   
  
“Doctor Kahr,” she greets placidly. “Thank you for making the time. I heard you haven’t conducted any autopsies yet.”   
  
“The first two are defrosting as we speak,” Dankovsky says with a bleak smile, taking the high backed chair opposite her desk. “First two in this town, I should say.”   
  
“Then let’s avoid the physical, for now. What do you think Artemy Burakh’s motive is?”   
  
Daniil is well aware he should play dumb. The problem is, he doesn’t want to be thought of as stupid. “I think the murderer is pursuing knowledge. They aren’t deriving pleasure from these murders, they are means to an end. That end, I believe, concerns the mine’s output; specifically, the alchemical properties of the metals.”   
  
“What are you basing that hypothesis on?”   
  
“The fact that I, a thanatologist by training, was summoned all the way from the Capital to attend to this crime?”   
  
“I see,” Kahr says, making a note.

“...your area of study was psychophysics?” Daniil asks, trying to discreetly read her miniscule handwriting upside-down, and having no luck.   
  
“Yes. And yours was medicine, first, but then thanatology.”   
  
Daniil nods along, though there wasn’t a modicum of inquisitive inflection in her words. “The two are inextricably linked, after all. Medicine has the same implicit goal, but lacks resolve and imagination.”   
  
She makes a note. “And after that, pathology.”   
  
Now he restrains a grimace. “Yes. Pathology. Please excuse my frankness, but what could possibly motivate you to leave such a promising, rapidly advancing field to hunt down criminals?”   
  
Her expression is not so lofty, nor so friendly. “Our results speak for themselves.”  
  
“I mean, results are results. But I can’t make sense of institutional allegiance. The Inquisitorial ranks were staffed exclusively by bloodthirsty sectarians before the pragmatists and the rhetoricians took over. It’s still a battering ram, a blunt instrument.”   
  
“You know a lot about Inquisitors?”   
  
“I know  _ of _ a lot of Inquisitors. I’ve met only one. I was expecting moral quandaries and death threats.”   
  
“Do you like those, Doctor?”   
  
“I dislike the moral quandaries. Death threats, I’m ambivalent on. Obviously, they provoke some practical concern, but they also usually indicate that my research is on the right track.”   
  
“Well, allow me to disappoint you,” she says, with a placid smile. “Is it a greater sin to tell a foolhardy truth, or tell a clever lie?”   
  
“From a strictly consequentialist viewpoint, perhaps it is no sin at all to tell a stupid lie, as nobody is taken in.”   
  
She waits for a better answer.   
  
“The foolhardy truth, of course. Bravery is often a thin gilding with which we adorn stupidity. A decision is correct, or incorrect. If you have chosen astutely, you need not be brave. If a lie permits peace, prosperity, advancement, it takes no great conviction to enact.”   
  
Another note. “And what if the correct choice is not evident even to the astute?”   
  
The Bachelor considers this only for a beat. “That reflects the sin of sloth. One should be fully informed about the choices one makes.” He’s discontent with his own answer, at once. He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince, because it is surely not this whip-smart Inquisitor; of course there’s indecision, of course there’s hard choices, of course there’s trade-offs. He thinks about trying to better phrase his belief in the plausible moral righteousness of deception.   
  
Kahr interrupts his rumination: “Will you learn more about a thing you are intimate with by viewing it through a perfect mirror, or an imperfect one?”   
  
An interesting question, but it feels like a trick. “You learn most with no mirror at all.”   
  
From that tiny, disappointed movement of her lips, it’s clear that the lateral thinking is taken as evasion. “You may leave.”   
  
Dankovsky’s first impulse is relief, followed by searing offence as soon as he’s hurrying down the Hammer’s steps. Such a quick dismissal can only mean one thing: his answers were unsatisfactory, and he is deemed unworthy of Inquisitor Kahr’s consideration.   
  
He’s halfway down when he sees Clara, lugging along a duffel bag as she scales the steep staircase.   
  
Daniil almost trips on the snow-sheened steps in his haste to reach her. “Who killed Vishenvskaya?” he demands, the words half-snatched by the wind.   
  
Clara seems to have had all her colours muted overnight. There’s no suggestion of that perpetual smirk on her lips. “Grace and I were asleep. The gunshot woke us, but by then, they were gone. They picked the lock, though that doesn’t inform us of much; who doesn’t know how to pick a lock?”   
  
Daniil feels a flash of rage, almost berates the girl for her lack of preternatural foresight, her failure to avert this death. That would be absurd. “And the Inquisitor is taking you in?” he asks doubtfully, gesturing at the suitcase.   
  
“The Behaviorists wanted to know why Grace and I were in town. They asked me questions about Irina. Said I couldn’t stay at the house while it was a crime scene. It’s only for the night, I think.”   
  
“I didn’t think Inquisitors concerned themselves with such trivialities as children freezing to death on street corners.”   
  
“She’s like me. Or at least, she was. When she was a young girl, they thought she could tell the color of people’s souls. They thought she could perform miracles-- mindreading, knowing if someone was destined for salvation.”   
  
_ That’s one way to get recruited by The Powers That Be, if your test scores don’t cut it.  _   
  
“Grace wants to talk to Capella and Khan,” Clara continues, nervously. “I think it’s too soon. She is determined to saw off the tether keeping her on the surface and be down with the dead. I don’t know if I can save her this time.”   
  
Daniil grimaces. “I’m sick of feeling the cogs grating and grinding. The Behaviorists know how to close ranks and work together. We should align ourselves better.”   
  
“You’re a team player now, Danko?”   
  
He rolls his eyes and concentrates pulling his coats as tight as possible. “I’m staying at Property 87, in the Upper Pritchel. The Haruspex will be there at some point. To eat or sleep, at least.” He doesn’t state the offer explicitly, but it’s there. “You’ll need one of these for the funicular.” He fishes out a blue half-ticket, handing it over brusquely. “Can’t buy them down here. Don’t ask.” He walks past her quickly, embarrassed by his own kindness.   
  
“Don’t mention Lilich to her,” Clara says.   
  
Daniil pauses, turns. “Why not?”   
  
“Because they were too close. Just be careful, okay?” And she walks away, but she’s rushing too.   
  
Daniil watches her to the door, then looks back towards the tossing uncertainty of ocean swell and the chewed-up grey clouds and the mighty, endless sweep of snow.  _ Guess all those fish entrails were for nothing, Haruspex. _


	6. Chapter 6

He should go back to the bridge and ‘ _keep the Behaviorists busy’_ , but Dankovsky finds himself striding off towards the crime scene that is Vishnevskaya’s cottage.  
  
It looks the same, and why shouldn’t it? The same wooden flourishes of clamshell reliefs and intertwined snake track carvings, the same small windows, the same white curtains drawn.  
  
The gaggle of spectators whispering out front is new.  
  
Daniil is stepping towards the closed front door when someone from the amassing crowd catches his arm.  
  
The effete man from the circus is now dressed in a long parka, the kind Dankovsky has mostly seen children wearing. His long fingers in bright purple wool gloves stay on Dankovsky’s bicep. “It’s all locked up,” he informs Dankovsky. Then, dropping to a whisper, “Have you seen Artemy?” Dankovsky doesn’t like that soft mouth movement around the name.  
  
“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”  
  
“Avrelian of the East. And you’re Doctor Dankovsky. We met, briefly, when you were with Lila-- I mean, Clara.”

“‘ _Of the East’_ ? Is that a stage name?”  
  
He smiles, shakes his head. A few curls stray out of the parka. “They didn’t learn the names people had for themselves before they arrived. If your tribe was from the east, that was what they called you. Some families kept the name. ...you look curious, still. Ah, my sister’s name. Yes, Verity been married, and widowed.”  
  
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dankovsky says, not going to great lengths to conceal the obligatory nature of the condolence.  
  
“Thank you,” the man replies with palpable, uncynical gratitude. “So, Artemy is fine? I offered him a place to sleep, and I haven’t seen him.”  
  
“He’s fine, yes. Does anyone have any suspicions about who killed the chemist?” the Bachelor asks, gesturing at the crowd.  
  
“Not that they’ve confided in me. But nobody trusts performers these days. It’s why we had to stop touring, why we can’t pay to get the tent repaired,” Avrelian says wistfully. “You know, the people who lived here were performing long before anyone called it a ‘circus’. Dances. Enactments of great didactic value. They banned our rituals but they let us perform if we did it their way.”  
  
Dankovsky tries to steer the conversation back on track: “Who would have been party to the gossip, then?”  
  
“The mine killed her, Doctor. That’s what you need to know.”  
  
“...what on earth do you mean? A bullet killed her.”  
  
“It killed her one way or another. Like it killed Verity. She was dying of the pollution even before someone cut her apart. She could barely see the rope beneath her feet.”  
  
“Her eyes were missing,” Dankovsky muses, aloud.  
  
“...what?” Avrelian asks, horrified.  
  
Dankovsky realizes that this man hasn’t seen his sister’s body. “I should go.”  
  
“Tell Artemy I need to talk to him. About the mine.”  
  
Dankovsky takes one last, long look at the wooden cottage, and then hurries away.

  
  
  


There’s only one figure on the exposed run of groaning metal.  
  
“Where’s Tench?” Dankovsky greets, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.  
  
“Interviewing one of Vishnevskaya’s neighbours at the Town Hall,” Fyordorov says contemptuously. He barely looks up from the frozen splotch of blood he’s bent over examining. His ears are bright pink with the cold. Still no hat, not that Dankovsky has one either to feel superior. “Not the crime we’re here to solve.”  
  
“Why wasn’t I allowed on the scene earlier?”  
  
“Maybe Burakh slipped up, left some evidence we could use to find him. Couldn’t have you spotting it first and sabotaging our investigation.”  
  
“Why, you think I’d interfere with a crime scene?”  
  
Fyordorov gives a brief, slightly unhinged smile. “Well, the crime scene is documented as well as I can manage without a camera. You’re welcome to try to conceal whatever you choose now. It might even be useful to see what you’d want hidden.”  
  
“Thank you for the offer. ...aren’t you cold, Agent?”  
  
Fyordorov shrugs.  
  
“Who is the victim?” Daniil asks.  
  
“A goatherd,” he answers without looking up, then, “I don’t mean to be rude, but if you’re not going to do anything as interesting as sabotaging the crime scene, would you mind letting me work in peace?”  
  
Daniil sidesteps him to where the cadaver is gathering snow on one, windless side. He can see the trembling of stems and small flowers inside the spread ribcage-- not swevery this time, but he doesn’t know all the names. Right down to the roots. Artemy was right.  
  
“Anything of note?” Fyordorov asks.  
  
The Bachelor straightens upright. “He’s a big man, and there’s not enough blood for him to have been killed here. I’m surprised nobody saw the murderer moving the body.”  
  
“We’ll know soon enough," Fyordorov says, sounding disappointed in the observation. "Kahr has interviews scheduled. She’ll find her way to any witnesses. Inquisitors have such an aptitude for the acquisition of testimony.”  
  
Dankovsky leaves him to his uninterrupted work.

  
  
He trades the remainder of his cigarettes for more matches, though he has to actively seek out townsfolk to barter with; the weather is only worsening, and the streets are empty except for those hurrying home. Daniil can’t see the town or the ocean for the claustrophobic, blistering white out.  
  
The chimney of his little hut is smoking when he makes it back. He finds the Haruspex reading the Behaviorists’s notes. He misses Clara at first, so slight and so swathed in bedding. Only her reedy breathing gives away her sleeping form.  
  
Artemy greets him with a nod. “She said to wake her when you arrived. I think she should sleep a little longer; she didn’t last night,” he murmurs.  
  
“None of us are going anywhere in this weather. We can wait for her to wake,” Daniil agrees quietly. He goes straight to the stove to warm himself. “Where’s her friend?”  
  
“Grace is talking to Wendy, apparently.”  
  
“' _Wendy’?_ ” Dankovsky scoffs. Harder to communicate derision while whispering, he realizes. “She’s the most dangerous of the lot, if you ask me. Anyone trying that hard to exude the impression of moral infallibility is a danger to themselves and those around them. I mean, taking in strange children off the street?”  
  
Artemy smiles wryly. “You’ve put a roof over the head of worse, Bachelor. Clara says Kahr and Lilich were rivals. Did she remind you of Aglaya?”  
  
“Not particularly. Kahr seems ill at ease with her position, whereas Lilich was the consummate Inquisitor: all naked power and edicts and tactlessness. Kahr communicates herself as a member of the intelligentsia-- even introduced herself as her academic title-- and has yet to enact any sweeping societal reorderings that Lilich quickly enforced.” His hands are warm enough for fine motor control. He collects the fish from the cupboard, then sits at his miscroscope. “I don’t think she’s a real Inquisitor. I think she’s playing at it.”  
  
“Or she was setting you at ease. You’re an academic, after all,” Artemy muses.  
  
Dankovsky knows what he would have said a year ago. _For men who have accomplished what I have, ‘academic’ is an insult._ Now, he’d be lucky to be termed anything of the sort. “In a way, she rather reminded me of you. Two absolutely disparate doctrines forced into proximity. There is not much space in the mind of one person, especially not for such repelling beliefs to coexist. If she’s a scientist, she is all questions. If she is an Inquisitor, she is all answers.”  
  
“Aglaya had plenty of questions.”  
  
“I’m not talking about her morbid riddles,” Daniil says, taking out a razorblade, and beginning to peel away scales from skin.  
  
“Neither am I.”  
  
The unbearable squealing and shuddering of the storm worsens, though the Changeling remains undisturbed in her slumber. Daniil carefully deposits a fine slice of razored fish flesh onto a slide, then levers down a cover strip with tweezers.  
  
He takes a few minutes simply to find the ideal focus, light quality, and position of the specimen. He tilts his illicit mirroring light source until the lamp’s unhealthy yellow shines through the clumped white and grey cells, like hideously uneven roof tiling on some nightmarish Baba Yaga hut. Then, Dankovsky begins to sketch abnormal cell structures.  
  
Artemy speaks, barely above the wind. “The poison is a salt. I always thought my dreams were of rock salt, or ocean salt. But this metal forms a salt too.”  
  
Daniil doesn’t know how to reply to an unfinished statement.

  
  
He’s prying apart gill tissue with his razor blade when a thumping at the door manages to outcompete even the tempest beyond.  
  
“Dankovsky, please let me in. I don’t have anywhere else to go,” comes a voice. Fyordorov’s voice.  
  
Burakh is still crouched beside the stove reading about the colonial party murders. It seems to take him a moment to recognize the voice he heard through the door this morning, whereupon he sets the papers aside and stands sharply. Clara is peeking up from the bedding like an unfurling, noxious seedling.  
  
There’s another few thumps, though he seems to be kicking the door to draw attention, rather than knocking on it. Fyordorov’s ragged plea comes again: “The funicular is broken down. Even the general store is closed. Please. I’ll freeze to death out here.”  
  
To Dankovsky, this sounds less a problem, and more a solution.  
  
“Please.”  
  
Artemy grimaces, then starts towards the door.  
  
“What are you-- _fuck_ ,” Dankovsky finishes, as the latch is turned, and the Behaviorist stumbles into the cabin alongside a flurry of hurtling snowflakes.  
  
Burakh slams the door against the wind and puts his back to it.  
  
Fyordorov’s face is all but obscured, a wool scarf wound about his chin like a woman’s headscarf, then doubled back over his nose and mouth. Snow clings to his lashes. He looks at Daniil, then Clara, and eventually turns to the man barring his way back out. “Oh,” he says, somewhere beneath the dark wool.  
  
Dankovsky draws his gun, pacing over. He pulls open Fyordorov’s overcoat, removes the state issued firearm from the holster, retreats several steps before stowing both weapons away. As the snow-covered overcoat opens, the bundled scarf begins to slip. Fyordorov clumsily pushes it the rest of the way off. His nose is bright pink-- not the more worrying white, which means he might keep it-- and he’s shaking like a child’s rattle. He begins to sidle in the direction of the stove, almost trips over his own boots, then sinks unevenly down against the cabin wall.  
  
“What the hell are you thinking?” Daniil hisses, in Artemy’s direction.  
  
“He would have died out in that storm.”  
  
“ _And?_ ”  
  
The Changeling yawns widely, apparently unconcerned by the arrival. She gathers up the bedding and Artemy’s fur jacket. She begins to settle them around the slumped Behaviorist.  
  
“My fingers feel ...wrong. He kept telling me to buy thicker gloves,” Fyordorov comments, directionless and stilted.  
  
“And you,” Daniil says, wheeling on the agent, “you have-- you _had_ a gun. Why not order one of miner’s to open their door to you? Kick down the door if you have to.”  
  
Fyordorov shrugs. There’s no acuity in his blue eyes. “I don’t have the authority to requisition housing on a whim. Even getting this cottage for you took time. There is paperwork, a process, for that sort of thing.”  
  
“You’d freeze to death for the sake of paperwork? A noble sacrifice indeed. Poets will surely eulogise you as one of the great heroes of our time,” Daniil mutters.  
  
Agent Fyordorov actually smiles through his cracked lips, though it might be the mania of imminent mortality. “The people up here think I sabotaged their funicular. It’s possible that if I also forced my way into their homes, I’d be taking a rather shorter trip down to the port via the cliff face,” he half mutters, half wheezes.  
  
“Did you sabotage the funicular?” Burakh asks, setting the kettle on the stove, then pulling a chair over to the Behaviorist.  
  
“I asked too many questions about how that very thin thread could support such vast weights for so many years. To disbelieve is to destroy.”  
  
“Is disbelieve the right word? The suspension held. What is there to disbelieve?” Artemy asks.  
  
“Scrutinize,” Fyordorov corrects himself. He seems to really be processing Artemy’s presence now; he’s agape in a way that is less fearful, and more awed. Dankovsky hasn’t been looked at like that since his seminars. “Anyway, the crucial detail here is that it _didn’t_ hold,” Fyordorov adds.

“They think you destroyed it with scrutiny alone-- no wire-cutters involved?” asks Clara dubiously. She clears a little sleep from her eyes with the back of her woolen gloves.  
  
Fyordorov nods. There’s a little more pink to his lips, a little more breath in his lungs. “Wendy would say what cannot withstand scrutiny ought to be destroyed. The same could be said of what can’t withstand a gale in a port town.”  
  
“There is Utopian architecture in the Capital, is there not?” Dankovsky points out. “Why was the funicular of so much interest to you?”  
  
“If I asked too many questions about the more peculiar buildings in the Capital, I’d probably end up breaking my neck in a tragic accident on the stairs up to my apartment. In the Capital, the agents have agents. You understand being cautious with your questions, don’t you, Doctor? Even if you learned it the hard way.”  
  
“I say we kill him,” Dankovsky decides. “He’ll turn you in the moment we nurse him back to health. Even if we convince him of your innocence, there’s no guarantee he doesn’t see us hanged on principle-- you for evading arrest, me for sheltering you.” He tries not to look down as he speaks. He doesn’t want to kill the strange, frostbitten man, but it seems cowardly to ask Burakh to do it.  
  
“How old do you have to be for capital punishment?” Clara asks. “An adult, right?”  
  
“We don’t hang children,” Fyordorov agrees from beneath the pile of furs. “So, you’re not a murderer?” he asks Artemy earnestly. He doesn’t look cowed or offended by the discussion of his death.  
  
Burakh leans in on his chair, light eyes as blistering as the wind outside. “I’m not _your_ murderer.”  
  
“Know who is?”  
  
“We’re happy to hand them over when I figure it out,” Clara says.  
  
Fyordorov is still shivering, but he seems himself again; his attention has become uncomfortably invasive once more. “Dead or alive?”  
  
“We should take the gloves off. I’ve seen a lot of frostbite on the frontline. I’ll tell you which digits you can keep,” Burakh says expressionlessly.  
  
The gloved hands emerge from the bundle of fur and wool.  
  
Daniil paces. “I don’t know if you heard me, Burakh, but--”  
  
“I did.”  
  
“Well, then, are we warming him up for the slaughter?”  
  
“Some healer you are,” Clara says under her breath. “Isn’t your first rule ‘do no harm’?”  
  
“I’m a pathologist, actually,” Daniil replies in his most warning tone. “The harm has already been done long before my work begins.”  
  
Burakh shakes his head. He’s removing Fyordorov’s leather gloves-- unpadded, urban, like Dankovsky’s own-- with patient concentration. The grey leather is a little wet around the fingers. “If we kill him, we’re going to divert the case; the murder of the agent will become the only thing that matters to the authorities.”  
  
“So, we make it look like an accident,” Daniil suggests.  
  
“What if the Inquisitor figures out that it was three of us?” Burakh counters.  
  
“I’m not an adult,” Clara is quick to say.  
  
“I want this case solved, oynon. You believe they’re keeping information from you. I’d like to know what it is.”  
  
“And you’re hoping I’ll take your side after you interrogate me?” Fyordorov says, hoarse but sarcastic. His hands are still extended towards Burakh.  
  
“He’s right,” Daniil agrees, to a different end. “If we’re interrogating him, we should kill him, too.”  
  
“What did this guy do to you?” Clara asks. “There’s new venom in your fangs, Bachelor.”  
  
Fyordorov laughs under his breath. “I played a very underhand trick on him when he first came to town.” He entreats Daniil with wide, almost-sincere eyes. “...I wanted to know if you were surprised, or if you already knew Burakh committed the crimes you came out to help solve. And it was a stressor, one way or another. Often, the mentally disturbed react to stress in quantifiable, external ways--”  
  
“You think I’m mentally disturbed?” Dankovsky cuts in, brows drawn low.  
  
“I was-- no, I don’t think you’re like the men I’ve studied--”  
  
Burakh’s chair scrapes back as he stands. “You haven’t studied enough. They aren’t _my_ crimes,” he huffs, interrupting the lacklustre apology. He marches off, scrubs out the enamel washbowl over the small sink with soapy water from the unboiled kettle, then returns with it filled afresh. He tests it with his fingers, supplements it with some cold water from the barrel spigot. Then he sets the bowl on the Behaviorists’ knees, readjusting the blankets to support it. “Rest your hands in that,” he instructs.  
  
“Burakh didn’t kill Khan and Capella,” Clara half-agrees.  
  
Fyordorov’s head tilts. “I was speaking in analogy. That’s all,” he says, barely, to Daniil. He hurries to his next words: “Who do you think killed Victoria and Caspar?”

Daniil isn’t surprised that the agent recognises the nicknames, even if they weren’t in the files deemed relevant to pathology; he wouldn’t be surprised if Fyordorov has a file on every man, woman, and child in Town-On-Gorkhon. It wouldn’t be that many files, not after the sand pest.  
  
Clara shrugs. “Someone who figured the authorities would be stupid enough to blame Burakh. Khan and Capella were organising the kids in a hunt to find the real murderer. Everyone knew the town doctor was too soft for blood sport.”

Fyordorov’s wry smile quickly becomes a grimace of pain. He glances down at his hands, then his eyes raise to the roof. The very pink lips twitch with what looks too bitter to be a prayer.  
  
“If it hurts, that’s a good sign,” Artemy says, drawing the lamp off the table, then returning. He moves gentler than he looks capable of, manipulating the Behaviorists’ hands by the wrist and turning them over within the bowl. “This isn’t so bad. First degree. Maybe-- maybe a little worse, this tip here, on your ring finger. One amputation at most, not even the whole finger. Even that is a worst case scenario, an infection. ...this hand is even better.”  
  
“I fell in the snow. ...I think… maybe some of the fingers are broken.”  
  
“That ring finger, I think. Emshen, do you--”  
  
Daniil leans in towards the blue-white hands swimming in the chipped enamel bowl. “Proximal phalanx looks broken to me. Less swelling that you’d expect, but that will be the reduced circulation. I doubt you’ll find an x-ray in town to confirm.”  
  
“A what?” Clara asks. “I would heal your hands, but I’m saving my powers for Grace tomorrow.”  
  
Fyordorov is barely looking at his own injuries. “If you didn’t kill these people, Burakh, I need to know who did. If there’s anything you’re keeping from me, it’s to your own detriment.”  
  
“A stranger came to my village shortly before the murders started. Someone who knew of steppe traditions. I believe there’s a pattern, an old pattern, and it is rewriting itself in fresh ink.”  
  
“Then why did you go into hiding?” Fyordorov follows up, serious and professional.  
  
“I was almost killed in retribution for my own father’s murder, despite the fact that witnesses could attest to me arriving by train after the murder occurred. People were already whispering that the three murders-- it was only three, then-- were the handiwork of a menkhu. I wasn’t expecting due process, I was expecting to be strung up. And I have children to care for, Agent.”  
  
“I know. I interviewed them.”

“You talked to Murky and Sticky?” Artemy asks slowly, and Daniil decides he might have another vote in favour of murdering the Behaviorist.  
  
“Sticky lies a lot, doesn’t he? He said you were out of town the entire time, which was contradicted by about as many eyewitnesses as there are surviving townsfolk,” Fyordorov continues, not seeming to recognise the imminent danger he’s placing himself in.  
  
“He lies all the time. It’s a mechanism that has helped him survive some rough times, so I try not to get angry about it.”  
  
“Well, he wasn’t trying to save his own skin this time,” Fyordorov murmurs, staring away thoughtfully towards the warm glow of the stove. “Murky told us of every good thing you’d ever done, with great insistence. Every cut you’d sewn up and every toy you’d repaired for the local urchins. She reminds me of how I was, at that age. You must miss them.”  
  
“I… do,” Artemy says cautiously.  
  
There’s a long period of silence within the cabin. Fyordorov emerges from his thoughts with an unsatisfied hum. “I have to inform my colleagues. Come into custody peacefully, and I personally guarantee you that we will see this investigation through, and find the person responsible. If that’s you, it would be a mistake to hand yourself over. If it’s not you, then you have nothing to fear.”  
  
“You’re not the army man in your little organisation, so I’ll forgive this tactical misunderstanding, Agent. But be assured, you’re not in any position to dictate terms of surrender,” Dankovsky says.  
  
Clara laughs, which Daniil is surprised to feel pleased at provoking.  
  
Fyordorov addresses only Artemy now. He seems very composed, other than the sickly tremor of cold and of intense pain. “You want to avoid misdirecting the investigation with my murder. That’s a valid concern. But you are _currently_ misdirecting the investigation. By refusing to talk to us, by acting as if you’re the guilty party, you are making it impossible to pursue other leads. We need to eliminate you.”  
  
“And we’re to take you at your word that you’ll pursue the truth? Not simply get the case sewn up through whatever brutal powers you’ve been imbued with?” Daniil interjects.  
  
“He’s right that the crime is hamstrung while I am assumed guilty,” Artemy says in a depleted tone, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm. “People are dying.”  
  
“And they’ll clear your name by killing you and seeing if the crimes continue. That’s what they mean by eliminating you.”  
  
Fyordorov shakes his head vehemently. “We’ll keep you under surveillance, certainly, but you have my word that there will be no trial, no execution, without real proof.”  
  
“Oh, so you don’t think you have real proof yet?” Clara asks incisively. “And yet you have a reward offered for Burakh dead or alive.”  
  
“...I didn’t want the posters to say anything of the sort. We have orders from on high.”  
  
The Haruspex is focused on the immediate medical problem. “The colour is good. Blood flow is back. I should bandage your hands,” Artemy says mechanically. Perhaps he thinks attentive medical care will speak to his innocence. Daniil is sure it won’t.  
  
Daniil looks over Clara, hoping for some violent conviction reflected back; he sees a sleep-mussed child. Full of revulsion, miserable as he was when he shot that poor courier who refused to hand over those damn orders, he reaches for his revolver.  
  
“Don’t do anything rash, oynon. I’m not going to hand myself over,” the Haruspex huffs from where he’s hunched over Daniil’s leather doctor’s bag. “...why does a pathologist carry so much morphine?” he adds, beneath his breath.  
  
“Why doesn’t a doctor have any bandages of his own to offer?” Daniil asks testily, then reluctantly puts his revolver away.  
  
Fyordorov clears his throat. “Your lack of cooperation is going to complicate this. But, fine. As Doctor Dankovsky pointed out, I’m not able to make demands. Let’s move on. Clara, Daniil, Artemy-- do you mind if I use first names?”  
  
“Do you mind if I do?” Clara asks, advancing, squatting down to examine the Behaviorist in great detail.  
  
“Holden,” says Fyordorov, seeming to force it out. “We’re not supposed to give that out. Names are next to knowing, they said,” he explains, quieter.  
  
Artemy finds bandages, sets them in his lap. “I’m going to need to pat your fingers dry with a cloth. It’s going to hurt. You should drink this,” he says, pulling out a small bottle containing a very slightly opaque white liquid. There’s a heart sketched on the brown label. “It’s a painkiller, an effective one.”  
  
Fyordorov can’t quite conceal the doubtful eyebrow quirk, as Burakh raises the bottle to his lips. “I thought there was an overabundance of morphine.”

“I’m sure you heard every ugly rumor that ever circulated about me. Was there any suggestion that I was incompetent at my job, murdugch?”  
  
The Behaviorist seems to take the point; his chin tilts up and the little bottle is drained quickly. “It tastes like… what do you call it? The spirit that students are always drinking,” Fyordorov murmurs. His shoulders loosen first, then like a destabilized pyre, his entire weight beneath the furs crumples backwards into the cabin wall. Dankovsky recognizes the analgesia with something akin to envy.  
  
The briefest smile touches the lips of the Haruspex. “Didn’t take you for the twyrine type. Keep your hands steady. I’m going to bandage your fingers away from each other,” Artemy explains.  
  
The Behaviorist keeps the frostbitten fingers raised permissively, though he’s swaying unhelpfully. “Tell me about this old pattern, Burakh.”  
  
“I believe these murders to be a spiritual practice. That’s why we saw it all that time ago. These cuts are what a menkhu learns; they are, by design, merciful. These people must be considered sacrifices. Their pain is not the point of this.”  
  
“You said pattern. So, there’s a logic to how victims are chosen?”  
  
“I think so. I haven’t figured it out yet,” Burakh mutters, maneuvering around the hands with well-rehearsed dexterity.  
  
“It is a mistake to understand all of these crimes as one body. Some murders are not like the other. Vishnevskaya, for example, we don’t know if that’s our murderer,” Dankovsky says. "I suspect not."  
  
“Khan and Capella were not chosen freely. They got too close to figuring out the killer’s identity,” Clara adds.  
  
“Precisely,” Daniil agrees, smiling at her before he realizes what he's doing.  
  
“Interesting," Fyordorov murmurs. "So your argument is to ignore certain data points for a more accurate overall set? A scientific approach.”  
  
“Well, if we find out what Khan and Capella knew, _why_ the murderer’s hand was forced, we don’t need a pattern at all,” Clara points out, frowning.  
  
“We ran a thorough investigation into their murders. If they’d written down something crucial, or told someone, I think we’d have found it,” Fyordorov says, hiding a wince as the gauze winds about his fingers. “Or at least, someone else would have, by now. I think retreading that ground isn’t going to be productive.”  
  
“Grace will hear it from them,” Clara says, though her trepidation is palpable.  
  
“Well, when she does, and you have a concrete lead, I’d love to hear it,” Fyordorov says. He doesn’t sound as if he’s being condescending, but of course, he is. He must be thoroughly inured to absurdity, after all of his interviews on the Gorkhon. “Doctor, how does the-- pardon me. Doctor Dankovsky,” he begins, with an apologetic nod in Burakh’s direction.  
  
(It’s nothing but a clever piece of showmanship, Dankovsky thinks cynically. He heard how Fyordorov spoke behind closed doors: Artemy Burakh was a drop-out, a quack, professional failure.)

Fyordorov is still addressing him as if this is merely an extension of earlier consultations. “How does the pattern change, if you exclude those murders? ...the murderer doesn’t want to kill children? Is that helpful?”  
  
“The identities cease to matter,” Dankovsky muses. “Those two are so interwoven with the fibre of that town that they imbued the rest of the deceased with ...significance. But if you ignore them, the identities become white noise. The victims are chosen at random, maybe out of convenience. The pattern is elsewhere. The locations, the dates, something.”

“Despite being honed in on Artemy--”  
  
The Haruspex’s lip curls. He’s done with one hand, and he moves onto the next.  
  
“...sorry. Let’s stick with surnames. Despite that, we’re still looking for a pattern. We’ve been trying to preempt his-- your-- I mean, the kills.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“Well, we didn’t stop the murder yesterday,” Fyordorov says, sounding almost guilty. “We’ve ruled out everything we could. Calendar months, moon cycles, religious festivals. Are there any auspicious dates amongst the Kin that I might not know about, Doctor Burakh? Especially concerning sacrifices?”  
  
“It isn’t done by dates, as far as I know. It is done by what the earth requires-- those who know the Lines are consulted. But you’re more an expert than me, Holden.”  
  
“That’s kind of you to say,” Fyordorov says.  
  
“I wasn’t being kind. I wasn’t raised with them. I’m not even fluent. And I’m certainly not a part of the Kin any more, after what I did,” Artemy says, stooping over the bag to look for more cotton wool. He picks a small piece of kindling, snaps it to length, then loosely splints the broken digit.  
  
“Ah, yes. They say you killed the earth, Mother Boddho herself, to stop the plague,” Fyordorov says indulgently.  
  
“I know I damaged something irreparably,” Burakh says, an edge to his voice. “The precise nature of what I damaged might be impossible to prove, but I--”  
  
Fyordorov flinches.  
  
“That’s too tight. Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Burakh loosens a bandage, continues winding. “Something is broken because of me, and the Kin know that. ...there, all done.”  
  
“Thank you, Doctor. Would it be bad if I laid down for a bit? With the two murders last night, I didn’t have time to sleep.”  
  
“First, you can tell me why you needed a thanatologist on this case, _Holden_ ,” Dankovsky says, squatting close.  
  
The Behaviorist seems unintimidated-- rather, delighted that Dankovsky is up to speed. “Because someone dug up Simon Kain’s body and then reburied it. They must have thought we’d miss a little grave desecration amongst all the brutal murders.”  
  
“Did you know?” Dankovsky demands of Artemy.  
  
Artemy clearly considers lying. He doesn’t. “Yes. ...I didn’t ask you to help me solve this case, oynon. I asked you to distract the Behaviorists.”  
  
Fyordorov chuckles at that.  
  
“That’s a fucking lie. You said you needed my help in solving this,” Daniil growls.  
  
“You do get kind of crazy when you think eternal life is on the line. Like you don’t think your soul is in good enough shape,” Clara says. She’s wandered away and is looking through the cupboard. “Should we make some broth or something? Isn’t that how you coax people back to life, those of you who don’t have any gifts from on high?”  
  
“A broth sounds nice,” Fyordorov murmurs. His eyes are closed, and his head has lolled back against the cabin wall like a dead weight.  
  
Dankovsky nudges him with the tip of his boot. “I interrupted you, before you’d laid out your theory on Burakh’s murders. What were you going to say? How does it relate to Simon Kain?”  
  
The agent’s shadowed eyes flicker open, blue irises barely visible behind fluttering lashes. “I was hoping you’d tell me that. Never mind. I’ll find another use for you, Daniil.”


	7. Chapter 7

Fyordorov surrenders into herbal anaesthetic and bodily harm soon after he’s downed the broth. The white bandages around his hands barely poke from the furs piled beside the stove, like a snow-furred creature peeking from a burrow. Clara scurries back into what remains of the bedding without another word-- except what Daniil suspects to be a muttered prayer, before she rolls away.  
  
Daniil doesn’t speak to Artemy as he sits back to the microscope; he’s about one obfuscating half-truth from throwing a punch, and if he learned one thing in Town-on-Gorkhon, it's that he’s not built for brawling.  
  
He drinks a bowl of the thin broth-- a lot of water and a little canned meat and too much salt-- in between lens adjustments. His makeshift desk reeks of fish guts, but nothing on an underfunded state-run pathology lab.  
  
A gust slams against the wooden walls, rattling at the shuttered windows and the bolted door. The crowded hut groans like a beast with a belly wound. But, the crosshatch of log walls endure, and the combination of four bodies and a burning stove has the interior temperature almost pleasant.  
  
Tuning out the supposed tantrum of a moon god, Dankovsky can hear the Haruspex sighing to himself. Then the rustle of turned pages. No apology forthcoming, not that Dankovsky wanted one.  
  
The Bachelor resumes the dissection.

The storm seems to be in its final, feeble throes when Daniil finds what he’s looking for in the tail muscles. Heart racing, he returns to his previous sample of gill tissue. This search takes longer. The swollen, broken cells he’s seen plenty of. But, amongst the carnage-- “Burakh,” Daniil says, bolting up from his microscope.  
  
Artemy puts a finger to his lips as he stands from an uncomfortable hunch beside the stove's dim light, but he at once shuffles as close as possible. He looms over to squint down the microscope. His gloved fingers reach for the wrong focus, and Daniil clears his throat quietly.  
  
“You don’t need to readjust the thing. Precisely centered within the damaged tissue.”  
  
After several seconds, Burakh looks up, curious frown unresolved. “What am I looking at, oynon?”  
  
“Living cells. No blood flow. No oxygen or energy going in. No carbon dioxide going out. And yet, life,” the Bachelor breathlessly, urgently explains. “Or, rather, deathlessness. I’ve found the same phenomena on a second sample too.”  
  
“But the metallic compounds _caused_ death. Or at least, would have, given time,” Artemy points out. “A tiny portion of the body living on doesn’t make the body immortal. The body is functionally dead.”  
  
“Dosis sola facit venenum, Burakh. Anyway, it’s more complex than that. These deathless cells are surrounded by damage. I think this is the epicenter of the affliction. This tissue lives at the expense of its surroundings.”  
  
“Like a parasite sapping from a host.”  
  
“Or a noble sacrifice to allow the miraculous. ...the alchemist must have discovered this. I suspect our murderer is on this same track. The acrobat’s eyes were removed, and she was blinded by poison. So, her eyes must have also had--”  
  
“The vampiric cells,” Burakh agrees. “...what does this have to do with the Kains?”

Daniil finds one of his last cigarettes (the rest went to barter, mostly) and puts it triumphantly between his lips. “The connection is the possibility of life free from the horrors of decay and impermanence, Burakh. That’s what our mass murderer wants.”  
  
“...you sound like you might sympathize.”  
  
“Just like you feared, huh?” Daniil takes his time exhaling. “You weren’t keeping vital information from me merely to thwart my obsession. You think I’m a potential turncoat. That the killer might have more to offer me than you do.”  
  
“That’s not what--”  
  
“Whatever,” Dankovsky interrupts, then glancing around the cabin, “...is he awake?”

“Yes,” the agent answers immediately. Fyordorov rolls over enough to resume his unflinching eye contact. The whites of his eyes are a little bloodshot, and his boyish face is subtly lined with pain. “It’s calming outside. I should try to get down to town.”  
  
“Before we change our mind about killing you? Yes, it seems advisable,” the Bachelor sarcastically remarks.  
  
Burakh exhales in annoyance. “It’s a long walk, a steep track, and the snow is going to be thick.”  
  
“If I don’t get back soon, we can expect a search party,” Fyordorov mutters. He tries to sit up, leaning on his elbows rather than his hands.  
  
“I’ll accompany you, then,” Artemy says, pulling him up by the shoulder, then freeing his own fur coat that Fyordorov slept beneath. “There’s going to be injuries to treat down in town, after that funicular accident.”  
  
“Go ahead and let the agent know precisely where you’ll be so he can sic his partner on you,” Dankovsky disparages, turning back to his overladen desk.  
  
“I’ll need my gun,” Fyordorov says awkwardly. “It’s state property.”  
  
Dankovsky snorts and doesn’t look up.  
  
“Daniil--” Burakh begins.  
  
The Bachelor pulls the Behaviorist’s revolver out. He clicks the chamber out, empties out all but one bullet, hands the firearm over. “You said you had a gun and no ammo, right, Burakh? Here,” he says, tossing one to Artemy, pocketing the rest. “Now you have a fighting chance.”  
  
Fyordorov tries to unbutton his coat to holster his gun, but his clumsy, bandaged hands seem to make it all but impossible. He pockets it with a grimace. “Do you have any other pain relief?”  
  
Artemy pulls out one bottle, turns it around to read the label, then finds another. That one, he hands over. “This is my last painkiller. You can switch to morphine in town, but be careful with it. You won’t feel the pain, but you won’t feel the cold either. You can’t be wandering the streets strung out.”  
  
It sounds rather pointed. Dankovsky puts the cigarette back between his lips and turns back to his desk. He’ll wait for them to leave before he’ll resume his specimen analysis. He can’t work like this.  
  
They don’t leave. Fyordorov clears his throat. “I’d prefer you to be there, when I speak to my colleagues, Doctor Dankovsky.”  
  
“To make my arrest more convenient?” Dankovsky asks without turning about.  
  
“I’m worried if I try to explain this alone, they’ll shout me down. You’d help with that; you’re very…”  
  
“Obstinate?” Artemy contributes. He sounds like he’s smiling.  
  
“Staunch,” the agent corrects.  
  
“I’ll come by the town hall once I’ve finished this necropsy, then; I, after all, at the Behaviorist's beck and call,” Dankovsky dismisses.  
  
This time, they make themselves scarce.  
  
  


His first clue that Clara is awake is the rustle of paper. He turns-- in half a mind to warn her away from the gruesome case file Artemy abandoned-- and finds her cross-legged, leafing through his thanatological research that ought to be hidden beneath the mattress.

His molars clamp against each other like a sprung bear trap. The only thing that entices him to loosen the grimace somewhat is an attempt to hurry her out of the cabin: “I can’t help but notice that the storm has passed, and you remain. So, to what do I owe the enduring pleasure?”  
  
She continues to read, in the distracted way that one might flip through a particularly fatuous women’s magazine.  
  
“...is this procrastination? Last minute jitters about interfering with the affairs of the dead?” Dankovsky prods.  
  
She still acts as if she doesn’t hear him, at first, but is eventually compelled to return fire. She discards the pages carelessly onto the bedding. “I wondered why you were hiding your scribblings, Bachelor Dankovsky. Perhaps some part of your soul can’t bear prolonged exposure to heresy.”  
  
It’s been a while since the Bachelor held a reflex hammer, but he recognises the spasms of a struck nerve. “I don’t believe Grace’s hallucinations will provide any possible insight into this case, and I’d go as far as to argue that any physical maladies she experiences from these episodes are psychosomatic, and therefore that indulging these fantasies is the only thing placing her at any risk-- _but_ . If we put aside what _I_ believe, it seems to me that you’re weighing whether you should trade her life to end this carnage. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but you should know which scales you’re weighing.”  
  
“Who am I to barter such heavy things?” Clara asks plaintively.  
  
“Who indeed? You should go and talk to your friend. Make a plan to get out of town. I don’t know what’s going to happen, now, but let’s assume the worst. Holy fire from above, swarms of locusts, firstborns dropping like flies.”  
  
“There’s no need to get skittish, Danko. We’ve seen horror before. This is just an aftertaste.”  
  
Daniil finds himself nodding.  
  
“So, you let the Ripper have his way? The suit left unharmed?”  
  
Daniil tries to reveal as little as possible with his shrug. He doesn’t like her tone at all. “Did you find the circus girl who looked like you?”  
  
“No. I never met the plague looking like me, either. I think she’s-- how should I put this, to mesh into with your mundane and imperceptive worldview? I think she’s a face of the poison. A creeping, sneaking embodiment. After all, the mountain spring that’s poisoning the bay runs right behind the circus tent. All of the performers are sickly from it, underneath all their lavish costuming.”  
  
“That delicate tightrope walker looked healthy-- if a little on the skinny side.”  
  
“He’s the one I tried to heal. His skin was horrible before. He wore face paint to hide all the blisters. ...it’s still going to kill him, you know. The poison has retreated into him and it won’t leave without a fight. And this sort of fight kills bystanders.”  
  
Dankovsky taps a finger against his chin. Human tissue, that’s what he really needs to examine. “And what gave your doppelgänger away?”  
  
“I’ve had my face borrowed before. ...there’s a repetition in this town, don’t you feel it? The aftertaste, like I said. The echo.”  
  
“Maybe you’re infernal triplets. Harbingers of annihilation.”  
  
Clara raises a scant, pale eyebrow.  
  
“Plague, poison-- you could be the embodiment of the war. Confused, and confusing,” Daniil muses, with a not very warm smile. “It would explain your affinity for Block.”  
  
She bristles. “I’m a healer, Bachelor. Has the war ever offered anyone mercy?”

“Is healer the right word? I’d say self-appointed, unproven miracle worker,” Dankovsky mutters, smirking back down his microscope. Yes, he’ll need samples of human tissue. From the deceased, and from the not yet dead-- if the acrobat is willing to be biopsied. “The war promises what it never delivers, too: enduring peace; national prosperity; dolce et decorum est pro patria mori. _Hah._ The war has made us scared and starved. And the glorious dead-- not so glorious. The casualties are innumerate and joyless and nameless.”  
  
“Maybe _you’re_ the embodiment of war. Burnt out, unpopular, but stumbling on still.”  
  
Daniil chuckles as he adjusts his focus again. The same halo of deterioration, and in the center, the slightest twitch of heart muscle. He keeps his ecstasy at bay. “Go tell your friend not to hold her little seance, girl. Maybe then you’ll be in better humor.”  
  
He might not have heard her fleet-footed exit, but that she slams the door for effect.

  
  
  


The bloodthirsty cold breaks him from his work before anything else. That’s what causes that spider-leg prickling on his nape; humans have no way of knowing when they’re observed, and Daniil doesn’t surrender to old wives' tales now. Not entirely, at least. His pulse is loud in his ears, as he turns, but that’s reasonable. If there’s cold, there’s an open door. And if there’s an open door, there’s-- nobody. He alights from his chair, hurries to the door and squints through the mist to try to see a rushed retreat. The alpine fog hangs languid and clinging and undisturbed.  
  
He checks to see that the key is in place (it is), then inspects the door to see if Clara’s theatrics busted the lock (they did not). Increasingly paranoid, he descends the wooden steps and examines the footprints outside the door. The snow has fallen two or three inches thick over the course of the storm and then ceased entirely, leaving pristine imprints. He can tell Clara’s at once, deft and diminutive. Two sets of men’s bootprints leave single file and then walk abreast; ergo, the Haruspex and the Behaviorist. The last footprints approach the cabin, then depart and veer away towards the cabins beyond. The Bachelor begins to follow the prints, has an abrupt recollection of Fyordorov’s staggering hypothermia, and hurries back inside to pull on his fur coat.  
  
In the end, the fervour of investigation ends fruitlessly, when the mysterious footprints meld with an indistinguishable slurry of a thoroughfare. He stops only to sell Fyordorov's bullets, buy a fur hat and a log of goat cheese. Dankovsky wraps his layers tighter, pulls the hat of curling black goat hide down over his ears and crunches back through the fresh snow to collect his medical bag, gather his notes, then head down the footstep-scored track down the mountain in an ambiguous lavender hue. Colossal clouds lord over the rugged scenery, not quite spent upon the blizzard.  
  
Though it would be madness to freeze half to death to lend authenticity to a lie about a broken funicular, Daniil has to admit he felt some doubts about Fyordorov’s story; the massive amount of foot traffic he sees scored into the white-blanketed mountainside affirms that nobody is getting down the mountain any other route. It’s late, and far below freezing even without the wind chill, and he doesn’t expect to make the trip back up. He’ll have to trespass against the Behaviorist’s hospitality-- which seems more than fair.

  
  
He’s sweaty under his collar and somehow also hideously bloodless in his extremities, but he makes it into the town. The fog is down here too, rapidly descending from above, mingling into the smothering pitch of night. He takes a long detour past the Hammer in order to avoid some menacing silhouettes, and keeps his head down as he sidles past narrow splashes of street lighting and towards the entrance of the town hall.  
  
It occurs to him that he might be going to the hangman’s noose (or whoever is deputized with the task on short notice) but he doesn’t slow. Burakh isn't going to survive long with those wanted posters up.  
  
He pushes open the rooftop door and starts down the staircase into the earth. A disembodied conversation ascends to meet him, echoing unevenly against the hard stone; Dankovsky takes great care to step silently and avoid interrupting.  
  
“--isn’t military jurisdiction. End of discussion,” comes the unmistakeable bass voice of Tench. It’s not a loud or heated discussion by any means, only audible because of the incredible amplification offered by the enclosed space. It it close, conspiratorial. “They’re throwing their weight around because it’s a boring fucking town to be stationed in, that’s it. The riflemen guarding her house would be sitting on their asses otherwise. Vishnevskaya hadn’t worked for the military for over _two years_.”  
  
“So, we go with Holden’s strategy. Say we haven’t yet confirmed whether she was one of Artemy Burakh’s victims. I’ll play the Inquistorial card if I have to, though I don’t think any higher ranking army personnel will be deterred for long. But we buy ourselves some time to go over her research, follow up with her neighbours,” comes Doctor Kahr’s cautious reply. First names, Daniil notices.  
  
“I don’t like doing this underhand. Holden is the one who insisted that murder _wasn’t_ one of Burakh’s.”  
  
“He also agreed that it was probably connected to our line of inquiry. After all, Doctor Dankovsky had just been to see her.”  
  
“Which, if you ask me, makes him our prime suspect,” Agent Tench mutters grouchily.  
  
“…rather uncalculated, for a man like him.”  
  
“So it’s a superiority complex. He thinks they can get away with a murder right under our noses because he’s that fucking clever.”  
  
“At the very least, we should operate on the assumption that his visit led to the murder. Someone who didn’t want her talking to the authorities? By the sound of it, Dankovsky got more out of her than you did. What did he say they talked about… ‘epistemology’?”  
  
Daniil is close enough to hear a match struck, and smell the waft of burning tobacco. He feels like he’s thirteen again, pressed to the kitchen wall to hear what the men from the Capital are saying to his father about his test scores.  
  
“Holden wanted to be there, when we interviewed our pathologist about his potential personal involvement in a murder,” Tench mutters. “But I guess wandering off into a blizzard and getting fucking frostbite took precedence.”  
  
Doctor Kahr only hums in response, but there’s an immense weight of disapproval contained in the note.  
  
Daniil begins to edge around the half-closed door. He never went inside this upper room, and can’t see either of them inside, only the very corner of an imposing desk. He’s been too surreptitious in his arrival to announce himself now.  
  
There’s quiet for several seconds, then what sounds like a defeated sigh from Tench. “He should be in his fucking bed right now, not talking to eyewitnesses,” he says, growing gruff. Furniture scrapes.  
  
Daniil frantically scales the staircase past the landing. He slows himself when he thinks he’s out of sight, trying to lower each foot with the precision of a surgical operation. One boot lowers against stone. The other. Goddammit, this is slow going. But, he doesn’t hear anyone following.  
  
He makes it to the second basement landing, to the interview room he’s been in before, and tries the door. It’s not locked.  
  
“But you’re absolutely certain--” comes the slightly agitated voice of Fyordorov. He notices the intrusion at once, and cuts himself off. He’s sitting opposite a-- Dankovsky almost thinks of her as a steppe woman, despite the fact he’s at least a hundred miles from the neverending grass and the herb haze and the bright, lofty sky. She’s dressed very differently than the steppe women: in a fur and wool knee-length coat with patches of very bright red embroidery, and a long weaved skirt trailing almost to her ankles that swish nervously beneath the table.  
  
“Am I interrupting?” Dankovsky asks, finally fully exhaling. He’s somehow relieved at the sight of Fyordorov-- looking just as tired, but with a healthier pallor to his freshly clean-shaven cheeks, and no tension of pain. His hair is combed down once more, though Dankovsky isn’t sure how he managed to tidy up with both hands still bandaged. His left was in much better shape, Daniil supposes.  
  
“No.” The agent stands quickly. “Thank you for your time and testimony,” Agent Fyordorov tells the woman, beginning to shovel papers back into his folder. A little too hasty. Daniil glimpses the wanted poster, and another clumsy sketch of a less bearded Burakh.  
  
The woman inspects him closely. “Have you figured out the antidote yet? To the poison?”  
  
He simply squints. How could she possibly know-- then, his eyes snap back to the pictures on the desk. Eyewitness. Artemy. _Fuck._  
  
Fyordorov is watching him intently. His face gives away nothing, but something in his posture seems as tense as a loaded slingshot. He waits for the woman to leave before he speaks: “I didn’t expect you until the morning.”  
  
Daniil wonders if he was expected at all. “Is she an eyewitness from Vishnevskaya’s house, or the bridge?”  
  
“The bridge.”  
  
“And she claims she saw Burakh?”  
  
The agent nods, still expressionless. He’d make a fine gambler, Daniil thinks.  
  
“For the reward, obviously. He wasn’t on that bridge,” Dankovsky points out.  
  
“...there’s a distinct possibility of that, yes.”  
  
Daniil’s eyes narrow. That agreement came too quickly. The second picture, facing the eyewitnesses on the interview table. She must have drawn it. And in that sketch, Artemy had no beard. Which Fyordorov is smart enough to have figured out. _Fuck._ Dankovsky considers going for his gun-- but then what? Shoot his way past Tench and Kahr, too? He tries to keep the desperation from his tone; “The woman Artemy told you about, he left out a detail. A detail that-- that I hardly believe myself, and I’ve beheld inexplicable phenomena aplenty.”  
  
“What’s the detail?”  
  
“He-- Artemy believes she can change her appearance. She might not even be a woman. ...maybe it’s disguises, or trickery of some sort,” he tacks on, though he doesn’t believe that. Artemy Burakh is no fool, and neither is Rubin (at least, not ultimately). Disguises, they would have seen through. But it sounds more palatable.

“A, what, actor in stage garb?” Fyordorov asks slowly.  
  
“Not exactly.”

“...a shapeshifter?”  
  
Daniil winces, raises his hands. “I know how this sounds. But other people saw this too.”  
  
“I know,” Fyordorov says, and finally blinks. “Behind you, on that desk. The blue file.”  
  
Relief almost staggers Daniil. His shoulders drop, and he turns in a rush. There’s a broken camera, another stack of leather bound documents. “I don’t see a blue file--” the Bachelor begins to say, then he hears the unmistakable cocking of a revolver behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I'm sorry for this huge delay, I have had an awful month.)


	8. Chapter 8

“Hands up. Keep facing the wall,” Fyordorov orders.  
  
Dankovsky clenches his hands to squeaking leather fists, then slowly raises them. He never likes being tricked, but being tricked twice by the same man is an unforgivable slight.   
  
“Bill, down here. Fast,” Fyordorov shouts, very loud but unpanicked. When he speaks again it’s soft, almost reproving. “Just how stupid do you think I am, Doctor?”   
  
“I would call you plenty of things, but not stupid. The truth isn't always readily convincing,” Daniil entreats the wall he’s facing.   
  
“But a _shapeshifter_ ? Don’t tell me a man of science believes that.” But beneath the scoffed words, Dankovsky hears indecision. “...what did he promise you? The secret to eternal life?”   
  
“Listen to me. _Really_ listen, because otherwise you’re about to become nothing more than an obstacle to the solving of this crime. Artemy Burakh was asleep in my cabin last night. He wasn’t out murdering anyone, and he wasn’t on that goddamn bridge--” Daniil falls abruptly silent as he realizes two things close to simultaneously: Fyordorov is trying to buy time, and he’s trying to buy time because he can’t aim a gun with his bandaged fingers. Daniil lurches to his left, scrambling behind a desk.

There’s no deafening retort inside the confined basement space, only a muttered _‘fuck’_. Then, louder, “Bill!”   
  
Daniil charges towards Fyordorov now. There’s a bandage corner between the Behaviorist’s teeth, trying to free the fingers of his left hand. The gun is barely clasped in his other, with no finger on the trigger. Daniil knocks it away with a clumsy, open-handed blow. The revolver hits an autopsy diagram of strewn innards, knocking papers free as it falls to the floor a few feet behind Fyordorov.   
  
The agent doesn’t go for the weapon, instead sizing up Dankovsky like a boxer in a ring. Daniil starts backing up, pulling his revolver out a little clumsily (mercifully accessible in the fur coat's pockets). He aims for the chest of the agent just as Fyordorov lunges towards him. His finger is on the trigger but Daniil once again finds himself unable to pull it.   
  
Before he can understand his own lack of resolve, Fyordorov’s shoulder hits him squarely across the chin. Daniil feels his tendons struggle to protect his wildly over-extending neck, and the bright blankness that accompanies massive head trauma. The Behaviorist might not be as physically imposing as his partner, but he’s a trained government operative, and there’s muscle beneath his unfashionable overcoat. There is nothing cerebral or theoretical about this struggle now; Dankovsky is fighting for his life and so is Fyordorov.   
  
The Bachelor falls backwards, fur hat coming loose, dragging down a pinned crime scene map and a line of connecting wool. A photograph of the Burakh house and a typed page flutter free too. He keeps hold of his gun, somehow, but Fyordorov is bearing it away with his forearm, keeping it pinned against the crowded wall. A botanical diagram skews and falls. Dankovsky surrenders his grip on the weapon, draws back a few inches then drives his elbow into the Behaviorist’s splinted finger.   
  
An unsportsmanlike move, but effective; Fyordorov crumples to his knees with a nearly canine howl.   
  
Dankovsky gets to his feet then kicks his opponent in the ribs to keep him down. The Behaviorist rolls inwards, gasping and gaping for air.   
  
The Bachelor rakes his dishevelled hair out his eyes as he straightens upright. But the hair isn’t the problem; his vision is devolving into a punch-drunk blur. He sees Fyordorov’s gun and lurches over towards it, one hand on the wall. He stumbles into a chair as he bends to pick it up.   
  
When he finds his feet again, Fyordorov is already halfway to the door. The young man is bent double but desperately fast. Daniil regrets not putting more force into the kick. He checks the cylinder. Still only the one fucking bullet. His gun has three.   
  
Fyordorov sees his own gun, and freezes.   
  
“I’m sticking to my story while I have you at gunpoint, okay? I’m not lying to you about--” Dankovsky starts, stupidly, because there’s footsteps arriving at the closed door. Dankovsky drags Holden upright by the lapel and presses the gun to his head just as the door bursts inward.

Tench holds his gun like an army man: the steady, two-handed grip of a practised killer. His shrewd gaze darts around the room but keeps coming right back to his partner.  
  
“I’ll shoot him,” Dankovsky blurts, at once. “You let me walk away, or else--”   
  
Agent Tench ignores him. “Hol--Fyordorov, are you injured?” he calls, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Are you--”   
  
“I’m fine,” Fyordorov grunts.   
  
“Let me leave unobstructed. Or I’ll shoot him,” Dankovsky resumes, scowling.   
  
The young man shakes his head, right against the revolver. “Bill, he won’t shoot me. Look at him. Does he look like a man ready to kill?”   
  
“Holden, shut up,” Tench snaps.   
  
“He’s _bluffing_ \--”   
  
“I will absolutely shoot you,” Daniil interrupts. “I know exactly what happens if I put my gun down: you march me to a cell and then--” He never lays out his miserable future in entirety, because Fyordorov’s elbow flies back into his solar plexus.   
  
The gunshot comes nearly in unison. He feels it collide with his shoulder blunt and painless, all weight and direction. Then, a dull throb. He hasn’t been shot before; it doesn’t feel as significant as all those trauma ward bloodbaths. He tries to raise his arm to return fire and all of a sudden there’s pearly white coals burrowing into his flesh. His right arm ceases to function-- the gun tumbling to the floor-- and the breath exits his lungs as if it will never return. Fyordorov goes instantly for the dropped gun, as if the whole maneuver had been drilled in advance.   
  
Dankovsky stumbles down to one knee, hair falling across his eyes again. He raises his left hand to his shoulder. His fingers find warmth and wet.   
  
“Hands up,” Tench growls.   
  
Dankovsky grins lopsidedly up. _Well, Artemy, old friend, you might have to handle this investigation alone after all._ He tastes his own blood on his teeth. “Or what?”   
  
Fyordorov has a knee pinning the dropped gun to ground, bringing him level with Dankovsky. His blue eyes aren’t alight with triumphant-- they’re widened, pleading. “Please don’t go out like this; I know you were working on something important.”   
  
Dankovsky sneers at him. Then, he raises only one hand. The other hangs limp with pain at his side.   
  
Agent Tench marches over, grabs his uninjured arm and snaps handcuffs around his wrist.   
  
Dankovsky doesn’t cooperate, but he doesn’t resist either. The room seems to have lost texture and complication. All greys and vague outlines. The Bachelor blinks, and sees again. The roof. Tench is pushing him back onto the interview table, handcuffing his uninjured arm to the table leg.   
  
“You didn’t need to shoot him,” Holden critiques, still wheezing. He edges closer, cradling one bandaged hand. His attention seems split between his own pain, and Dankovsky’s.   
  
“What the _hell_ happened?” says Tench, frantically unbuttoning Dankovsky’s two overcoats.   
  
Fyordorov grimaces. “I told you I went to his cabin when the blizzard hit. Well, Burakh was there. They let me in. They let me _leave_ , Bill. I was going to explain it all to you once-- well, then you told me about the eyewitness.”   
  
“And in the meantime, you lied to me?” Tench asks gravely, getting the snakeskin coat free.

“By omission,” Fyordorov protests, then shrinks. “Fine. Yes, Bill, I lied. I wanted-- I _want_ to get to the bottom of this.”   
  
“You really are a piece of work.” Tench doesn’t bother unbuttoning the shirt, just rips it open and pulls it back from the shoulder. “Do you have bandages in your bag?” he barks.   
  
Dankovsky tears his eyes away from his own bared shoulder. He feels an entry wound only, and the angle is unexpectedly sharp. “I certainly _did_. I think Doctor Burakh used them all trying to treat Holden’s frostbite.”   
  
“...what?” Tench says, squinting. He must decide he doesn’t want the answer, for he turns back to his younger partner. “Wendy wasn’t armed; I told her to get back-up. Go intercept whoever is on their way, send them to find the nun.”   
  
Fyordorov takes off running on unsteady feet.   
  
Dankovsky groans in a way that has very little to do with being shot. “I can stitch it up. Just pass me my things.”   
  
That request is summarily ignored. Tench removes Dankovsky’s own neckscarf, and begins to apply pressure to the wound. The red grows richer. “Bullet glanced off a buckle. Wound isn’t deep,” Tench mutters, rapping the knuckle of his unbloodied hand against the warped buckle of the open snakeskin overcoat. “You got lucky.”   
  
Dankovsky laughs hoarsely, choked with agony and derision. “Oh, yes. Lucky me. I get the privilege of a state-sanctioned execution.”   
  
“Lie still, dammit.”   
  
Dankovsky does, if only because the muscle spasms of laughter hurt a great deal. “I thought you would have been trained to go for the kill, Lieutenant General. An off-target shot?”   
  
Tench leans in. “Threaten my partner again, and we’ll see how unreliable my aim is,” he promises.

  
  
A couple of disinterested, rifle-toting soldiers arrive and loiter by the door, then a rosy-cheeked woman wearing a heavy cape over her habit. She has her own medical kit with her, a huge faded red cross stitched to the front of the white case. She tuts as she examines the bullet wound on his shoulder-- no surprise, no questions. Dankovsky is having trouble keeping quiet now; the adrenaline is receding like the tide line before a monstrous tsunami. All he feels now are the terrible intricacies of damage.   
  
Tench has walked back to the confer with the soldiers in a hushed tone. He offers around cigarettes. Smokes with one hand; the other, drenched with gore, hangs by his side. Daniil can’t hear if he’s cajoling or giving orders, but the effectiveness is indisputable. The soldiers depart the room with barely a glance back at him.   
  
The nun pulls out a pair of surgical tweezers, wipes them with alcohol, sets them in a shallow aluminium dish. Then, the merciful amber of morphine emerges from her bag. She finds a vein with admirable swiftness, but the single ampoule barely takes the edge off. Dankovsky stares at the ceiling, jaw tight. She reaches for the tweezers, and he can’t entirely restrain the preemptive flinch.   
  
“He’s an addict,” Tench remarks dispassionately from across the room. “So, resistant. Give him another dose.”   
  
_Inuria qui contumelia_ , Dankovsky almost says. But he’s not sure it would come out as wry and detached as intended. But the offence (and nonsensical betrayal at Fyordorov’s relayed insight) is ameliorated by another injection of the opiate. The agony disperses like blood in water-- still present, but diluted, indistinct.   
  
He keeps himself mostly silent as the nun wordlessly cleans then pries open the bullet hole. His breathing is laboured but opiate-slow. Dankovsky watches in acute judgment, but he’s overall impressed by the surgical capabilities. The bullet looks intact, as it clinks into the dish amidst thick droplets of blood.   
  
There’s arriving footsteps, the clacking of hard leather soles-- shoes for a city street, like his own. Inquisitor Kahr appears, lowering her hood.

She takes in the absolute disarray-- scattered pages, some blood-flecked, the toppled chair-- then advances upon the interview table cum operating theater. Dankovsky would sit up, if he weren’t handcuffed to a table-leg and risking the excruciating possibility of opening the wound further. 

“How bad is it?” she asks Tench tersely. “Is he going to live?”  
  
“Sure. Where’s--”   
  
“I told him to go and sleep,” Kahr explains. Her lids seem heavy, and dark shadows have gathered around the inner corners of her eyes. (He never saw a bed in Lilich’s quarters, but he supposes Inquisitors must have human physiology.) Other than that, she could be walking to a podium in an overfunded symposium hall. She seems impervious to the grit and grime of her setting. “Sister, you should call by Fyordorov’s room after this. We can pay.”   
  
“You told him to get some rest-- and, what, he listened?” Tench asks in disbelief.   
  
Wendy raises an eyebrow. “What else would he be doing at this hour?” She stops the examination of Dankovsky’s injuries, and meets his eye. There’s no anger, no particular cordiality. Just as regally impassive as their first meeting. “So, Doctor. Is it live forever or die young?”   
  
The nun is threading a needle, and he waits until the first suture is in to respond, that he might keep his air flow steady. “That’s a very ungracious question to ask a failed thanatologist,” Daniil says, rawly.   
  
She turns and walks back to Agent Tench’s side. He almost misses her response; perhaps it wasn’t for him at all. “I didn’t ask a failed thanatologist.” 

He isn’t marched to a cell, in the end, but carried on a stretcher that the soldiers bring down. Handcuffed to that, too. Tench pays the nun (generously, judging by the multitudinous ring of coin against coin), then returns to furtive discussion with Kahr. They’re still in engrossed conversation as Dankovsky is carried away.  
  
The sky above glitters as he's ferried, sutured and drugged, out of the town hall's rooftop entrance. _How could the storm clouds have passed so quickly? Perhaps they’re not stars after all._ Daniil's concedes to his almost-beloved morphine.

Voices stir him, and then undeniable pain brute-forces him all the way to absolute consciousness. Dankovsky groans and cautiously sits upright, holding his aching shoulder. His mouth is hideously dry and tastes like decay. If the bullet wound wasn't enough, his surroundings also testify to his dire fate: the cell is small and cold and one entire wall is ceiling-to-floor bars. Beyond the welded iron, movement.  
  
“Morning, Doctor,” Tench greets, with an unfriendly smile. There’s a cigarette between his lips, and two chairs under his arm. He sets them up, facing directly into the cell. “Wendy and I were hoping to get your opinion on some developments in the case. You don't have other plans, do you?”


	9. Chapter 9

Dankovsky ignores the agent in favour of inspecting his own injuries. The dressing must have been changed while he’s been unconscious, and the wound beneath is puckered around the black stitches and tender. There's no alarming inflammation; some small mercy after being tossed in an unhygienic jail cell.    
  
The second arrival of clicking boots and the swishing of cashmere stirs up some obsolete adherence to decorum. Dankovsky nods curtly in Doctor Kahr's direction, refastening the pauldron-like dressing. The buttons are all lost from his dress shirt, and more conspicuously, his belt and bootlaces are absent too. He tries to button his coat over the bandages and dried-blood-flecked chest hair and then abandons the effort. He rakes his hair out of his eyes again. Too long, between the train journey and his time in town. He groans low in his throat and puts his head in his hands. Now, he feels the bruising played out across his lips too.   
  
“Is the pain bad?” Kahr asks, without a lot of sympathy.   
  
“Not torturous enough to force compliance, if that’s what you’re asking,” Dankovsky replies through his fingers. His voice is so guttural and alien that he feels crowded in his cell.   
  
Her withering stare feels as if it desiccates him further-- like an empty chrysalis shivering against the elements. She removes a pill bottle from her pocket. “I’m asking: do you need more pain medication?”   
  
“Well, I was shot yesterday.”   
  
She nods along in condescending agreement. “You were.” Elegant fingers delve into her fur-lined pockets. She rattles the glass bottle. “Aspirin.”   
  
“Seriously?” Dankovsky scoffs, though he steps forward with a palm outstretched.   
  
Tench is on his feet at once. “Keep your distance,” he barks.   
  
Dankovsky stops, showing his palms. He gives his best, lively smile.   
  
There’s a fleeting frown from Kahr. The two interrogators meet each other’s eyes in a wordless exchange. She unscrews the lid, removes one chalk-white pill and sets it on the ledge beside a bottle of water and what looks like stew.   
  
“I think you’re being melodramatic, Agent,” Dankovsky says as he sidles up to the ledge. The pill  _ looks _ like aspirin, but it could be anything-- not that it matters, given that they could drug his food and water if they were so inclined. He swallows it, not anticipating any sizeable relief.

“You put a revolver against my partner’s skull,” Tench says through smoke. He’s sneering-- or hiding a snarl. “I’m indulging in a little melodrama.”   
  
“Indulge away. You don’t mind if I eat, do you?” he asks, picking up the bowl (goat, predictably, and almost stone cold) and carrying it back to the bed. The cutlery is a cracked ceramic spoon which steadfastly resists any effort to scoop up broth. Dankovsky forgoes manners, and drinks from the bowl.   
  
“...you know how they lead their goats to the slaughter?” Tench asks, lightly.

“I don’t care to know.”   
  
“The herder trains one goat to lead the way. They call it the Judas goat.”   
  
“I outgrew Aesop at the age of five,” Dankovsky says, chewing on gristle. Prisoners get the very cheapest cuts, of course. “You can drop the allegory, Agent.”   
  
Tench nods, then doesn’t. “The other animals get their throats slit, but the traitor gets to live on. And then, next cull, the Judas goat leads ‘em in again.”   
  
“That’s the paltry bargaining chip you’re pushing forward? My own life?” Dankovsky scoffs.   
  
“We found a lot of research in your cabin, Doctor. Research you can’t finish dead.”   
  
“It’s already finished,” Dankovsky lies, in pointless, petty rebellion.   
  
“Well, I’m not the expert,” Tench says, opening a document wallet, and beginning to sift through through the pages within, “but I don’t believe you’re completely satisfied.” Dankovsky recognises not only his sketches of the vampiric tissue samples, but the thanatological notes that he’d returned underneath the mattress after Clara discarded them. Tench removes one page: several half-formed chemical equations about energy transfer in marine life, and beneath it, a diagram of the heart cells that continued to beat post-mortem. “Dissecting fish. Now, how did you get on to that particular tangent, Doctor?”   
  
“I’m studying the poisoning, as I informed you. Unlike the murder victims I’m due to autopsy, the fish wasn’t frozen solid.” Dankovsky tries to fix his shirt, again. Failing, he wraps the fur coat tighter, draws himself up to his full sitting height. “I was doing my homework.”   
  
“Is it an affliction that could be cured?” Kahr asks.   
  
“Maybe,” Dankovsky says, unable to drag his eyes away from the folder. All his hard work in the hands of ingrates and vandals. He feels like a half-slain scholar watching Mongols burn their way through the House of Wisdom.   
  
“You don’t concern yourself with antidotes? With the wellness of the populace?” the Inquisitor follows up.   
  
“I wasn’t summoned here to concoct an antidote,” the Bachelor retorts. “I thought allocation of resources, logistics of problem-solving, were reserved for Inquisitorial discretion. If you wanted me to work on that instead, I was at your disposal.”   
  
“Right. Because you obediently followed all other orders,” Tench scoffs. The confrontational tone merits another reproving glance from the Inquisitor. The older agent grimaces apologetically.   
  
“Fyodorov told me about your shapeshifter theory,” Kahr says delicately. Even with her flawless self-control, disbelief tinges the word ‘shapeshifter’.   
  
Daniil finishes the last of his meal, rather than embarrassing himself with explanation.   
  
Tench drags on his cigarette, poorly feigning patience. “Care to elaborate?”   
  
“I was very upfront with your partner. Why don’t you go interrogate him instead?”   
  
“Because we believe that--” the Inquisitor starts, but falls silent as a pair of soldiers pass. They continue down the corridor without pause, but there’s something territorial about the intrusion nonetheless.   
  
“...the army out to get you too?” Dankovsky prods, spurning the Changeling’s advice to avoid mentioning Lilich. His situation isn’t going to get any worse; in mortal, gladiatorial combat, no blades should remain sheathed.   
  
Doctor Kahr folds her arms. Her inscrutable hazel eyes alight upon him like the beam of a magnifying glass lands upon an ant.   
  
Agent Tench doesn’t seem aware of the sudden tension; he’s staring distractedly in the direction the soldiers departed. “I’ll be right back,” he murmurs to Kahr, striding away.   
  
She waits for him to be gone before she parts her lips. Mouth barely open, she reconsiders her wording. “Was the army out to get Lilich?” Kahr asks eventually, apparently unshaken.   
  
“Lilich knew when the end was coming. A rather macabre party trick, but impressive all the same. Her demise came so unexpectedly, I didn’t get a chance to recant my cynicism. If you triumph so completely, you really should ensure you can gloat about it.”   
  
“Your residence was so close to the Cathedral where Aglaya was set up, as I understand it. Did you work closely with Inquisitor Lilich, when you sought to contain the outbreak?”   
  
“Not at all. I tried to avoid her. Now, Artemy, he was  _ very  _ close to Aglaya.”   
  
Her composure breaks with the barest twitch of an eyebrow. “Not so close he felt compelled to watch her back.”   
  
“Should he have overturned fate itself?”   
  
“You know, I looked forward to meeting you, Doctor. I’d anticipated more than euphemism and sophistry.”

“You’d prefer sincerity?”   
  
“I would.”   
  
“So would I. What I mistook as philanthropy-- taking in those two girls-- that served your agenda, didn’t it?” Dankovsky asks, stalking forward to the bars of his cell. They stop him cold and undeniable. “Those final days of the outbreak, Block unburdened his conscience with confessions to a juvenile miracle worker. I’m sure that was in Fyordorov’s files. Clara could tell you what Block’s role was in Inquisitor Lilich’s death, so you tried to befriend her.”

Kahr tilts her head. “ _ Fyordorov’s _ files?”   
  
“No offence intended to Agent Tench,” Dankovsky drawls out, injecting as much superior spite as possible. “Holden seems more ...comprehensive. That seems the polite way of putting it. So, what did you get out of Clara?”   
  
“Clara seems to be avoiding me.”   
  
“Or she’s busy with her own agenda. So, you and Aglaya were close?”   
  
“...once,” Kahr says, unexpectedly earnest.   
  
Daniil is so taken aback that he forgets to be the belligerent reprobate. Instead, he’s stilted, uncomfortable. “When you were studying together under Inquisitor Orff?”   
  
A wistful smile rises. “We were cutthroat rivals back then. We only became close once we were both in the field. We recognized how wholly pointless our internecine conflicts had been, and abandoned them as an adolescent folly.”   
  
“So you started as rivals, became friends, and then ...you fell out again?”   
  
“Aglaya saw my academic pursuits as a desertion of my Inquistorial duties,” Wendy says distantly. “No, worse than that. She saw it as betrayal, as the great betrayal. I had allowed questions to swarm my convictions, to eclipse them entirely. I had embraced imperfection like an adulterer grasps greedily at their lover.” She clasps her hands very tightly in her lap. “...it’s torture, isn’t it? To appreciate someone’s intelligence, their immense skills, and still have insurmountable disagreements.”   
  
Daniil looks down, thinking of the final day of the outbreak, his efforts to reframe Burakh as an opponent. His mind wanders-- trying recall the unearthly fractal angles of the Polyhedron, the slope of its unsoiled contours over the putrid ground. The tower seems to resist accurate recollection of dimensions, textures-- as if forever lost to human conception. “I… don’t like to be reliant on others, for that precise reason.”   
  
Kahr leans in. “It’s not treachery. Not really. To voice disagreements is to be a scientist.”   
  
“I have disagreements with Burakh. Many disagreements. But I wouldn’t sit idly by while he murders dozens of people, Doctor Kahr,” Daniil sighs.

“Even in pursuit of the zenith of human accomplishment?”   
  
Dankovsky opens his mouth, closes it. There’s footsteps echoing down the narrow corridor. “You never reconciled with Aglaya?” he deflects.   
  
She just barely shakes her head, watching Tench’s reapproach. “No, I--”   
  
“We have to go,” Tench interrupts bluntly, from several paces away.   
  
“You do?” the Bachelor asks, finding himself disappointed.   
  
“Battleship’s due to dock in--” the beleaguered agent glances at his watch, winces. “--fifteen minutes, give or take. Looks like they found someone to outrank us. By force, if nothing else.”   
  
“Who?”   
  
“A general. I don’t know who. We’ve been asked to organise a brief on the Vishnevskaya murder.” That name, he seems to cast in Daniil’s direction.   
  
Inquisitor Kahr doesn’t seem afraid, but annoyed. “When you asked me to take up the Inquisitorial mantle again, your justification was that we’d be insulated from this sort of military manoeuvring.”

“I thought we would be. Every year the war goes on, Inquisitorial stock goes down, and the military stock goes up. I don’t want to waste time on a pissing contest, but we need to go make sure--”   
  
“Ah,” Kahr says, eyes flitting toward the cell.   
  
“We don’t want irregularities in our brief," Tench murmurs. "Not after the Dubovo case.”   
  
“Then let’s ensure there are none,” Kahr says with a steely expression. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear as she stands, buttons her coat-- readying for a fight.   
  
Tench pulls out another cigarette and hurries after her. He seems more impatient, more nervous, than his counterpart.   
  
“If you give me access to my notes and my microscope and obtain certain tissue samples for me, I can create an antidote. Then you can hang me,” Dankovsky calls after them.   
  
Tench and Kahr don’t even glance backwards.

  
  
With little else to do in his grimy cell, Dankovsky tries to sleep. There’s a palm-sized, white-flecked window that becomes radiant with direct sunlight. Beyond, seabirds struggle amongst themselves for annexation of a steeple perching spot.   
  
The aspirin does almost nothing, and Dankovsky lies in indeterminable, drowsy agony until he hears another approach.   
  
Fyordorov is out of the plain, urban overcoat and in a heavy coat of grey and white fox fur. The more damaged hand (that Dankovsky suspects he damaged further) is still bandaged, but the other is underneath thick wool gloves. He’s wearing a fur hat, which Dankovsky takes a moment to recognize as his own, that was lost in combat. The outfit of a man brutally berated for almost dying of hypothermia, Dankovsky suspects. The Behaviorist seems to be moving gingerly, most likely due to his ribcage. Dankovsky is almost certain he didn’t break any ribs; he’s a doctor, he would have known. Intercostal bruising is still a son of a bitch. Fyordorov is also sporting a very vivid black eye, which the Bachelor didn’t notice happening in the struggle. Maybe the headbutt.   
  
“Hello, Doctor,” Fyordorov greets.   
  
Dankovsky groans, and rolls away.   
  
“How’s the shoulder?” Fyordorov tries again.   
  
“I thought you’d be in military custody by now, for bungling the investigation. ...maybe ‘thought’ isn’t the right word. Hoped?”   
  
“...huh. I saw the battleship in harbour, but I scarcely believed they’d reroute it for our little power struggle. ...is that where Kahr and Tench went?”   
  
Dankovsky puts an arm over his eyes. “You don’t sound particularly concerned.”   
  
“About the army intervening? I’m not. Agent Tench will sweet talk them. Those regimental types always take to him.”   
  
Dankovsky grunts. The conversation feels done, but he doesn’t hear a departure.   
  
Holden’s voice is lowered, when he speaks again. “Burakh found me this morning, while Bill was off scouring your cabin. Picked the lock on my door and held-- now, I learned the name for it from an odongh ...Menkhu’s finger, that’s it. Held his ceremonial blade to my throat.” He’s leaning right against the heavy iron bars. “Demanded to know where we were keeping you. I told him. And, I told him it would be certain suicide to try to break you out.”   
  
“You’re lucky he didn’t slice you from belly to jaw.”   
  
Fyordorov smiles oddly at that. “He doubled down on your shapeshifter theory. Which really is too flimsy a lie to be preordained.”   
  
Dankovsky averts his eyes to the window, where increasingly wispy daylight struggles into his cell. “I should have lied. I wouldn’t be awaiting my execution, if I’d played the cynic. My own fault,” he laments. The steepletop is silhouetted by undulating ocean glare. “Expecting a man like you to keep your word.”   
  
“I’m sorry it happened like this.”   
  
“Oh, apology accepted, then. They’re going to hang me, did you know that?”   
  
“Not for days, at least.”   
  
“Apology doubly accepted. I have whole  _ days _ to look forward to.”   
  
“We’ll solve this case before it comes to that. I will put aside my-- ah-- questions in order to be a more efficient investigator. But I need more, Dankovsky. I need to know everything you three have found out, if I’m going to connect it all. I need data.”   
  
“Whatever could you mean?” Daniil slouches back into his beam of light and almost closes his eyes. “Artemy Burakh is your man. No sound-minded detective would entertain a theory as fanciful as a shapeshifting killer.”   
  
Holden sighs, turns to leave. “They’ll offer his life for yours,” he remarks, over his shoulder. “You’ll be spared-- well, relatively spared. North to the mines, most probably. They have to figure out how to contact him, and only him.”   
  
Daniil can’t help but ask, “Why only him?”   
  
The Behaviorist pauses, but doesn’t look back. “If we announce your personal connection to the Ripper, there’s a decent chance a lynch mob storms this place. And there goes our leverage.”   
  
“...’our’ leverage? You’re still on the team?”   
  
“Hah, no. I’m frozen out for now. Their strategy from here, offering to commute your sentence, that’s all supposition. But I know how they work.”   


Dankovsky wonders if that’s true, or if this is an elaborate orchestration of good cop, bad cop. Before Fyordorov can exit earshot, he asks: “Why did the steppe people talk to you?”   
  
Holden turns, curiosity stealing across the boyish features. “Everyone living in that town is on the steppe, Daniil. But I suppose you mean the Kin?”   
  
“I do. Burakh was very surprised that they entertained your questioning. I am too; I barely managed to elicit yes or no answers from them, and even those they preferred to answer with insults and riddles. And you-- equally foreign to them-- managed to document the minutiae of their sacred traditions.”

“Shortly after our arrival by train, I was approached by a child-- a child of great cultural significance to the Kin. Taya Tycheek. She knew I investigated crimes, even had a newspaper clipping mentioning me by name, though I don’t think she understood my skill-set; she seemed to expect me to... I don’t know, cast a handful of sheep bones and interpret them. Pluck the guilty party’s name from thin air.”   
  
“So they cooperated because one of their own was dead?”   
  
“Oh. Oh, no. There were three murders out in Shekhen-- their reclaimed village--” Fyordorov explains, as Dankovsky opens his mouth to ask, “and the crime had gone unsolved for months. An assassination attempt, Miss Tycheek claimed. Made against Mother Superior herself.”   
  
“Related to your case…?”   
  
Holden shakes his head, and leans back against the corridor’s far wall. Another pair of soldiers pass; Fyordorov doesn't spare them so much as a glance. “The modus operandi was very different from the--” he cuts himself off, with a wry smile. “Until such a time as I’ve attained absolute clarity, I’ll avoid calling them the Burakh murders. The ritual murders we were summoned to town to deal with. There was a struggle when the trespasser was discovered-- the assailant had a knife, and of course, none of the Kin carried weapons. We already knew the ritual murders were all peaceful and clean.”   


“So why did you look into it?”   
  
“I wanted to prove my efficiency. Predispose locals to cooperation. So, I helped the Kin. No forensic evidence remained in existence, there were no eyewitness accounts of the murderers, just a few verbal descriptions of the crime scene after the fact. The bodies had already been disposed of-- burned. A sensible habit during the plague that seems to have cemented with the more superstitious townsfolk.”   
  
The Behaviorist might be describing an unsolvable puzzle, but he has a self-satisfaction about him that intimates success. The Bachelor waits, and not particularly patiently.   
  
“They mentioned that the twyre beds had been stripped,” Fyordorov says, into the lengthening silence. “Odd, for an assassin. Twyre has been in short supply, apparently, even though I was in town during the bloom.”   
  
Dankovsky itches at his split lip. “...so. Enterprise, not politics?”   
  
Holden grins. There’s an unconcealed appreciation at the prompt deduction. “When the Stamatins weren’t preoccupied designing their next Pharos, the twyre trade revolved around them. From them, I found the man who had sold off a bounty crop on the night of the murder.”   
  
“You asked nicely, did you?”   
  
“I insinuated that otherwise I’d be seizing all of their homemade twyrine and testing it for a specific varietal of herb that only grew in Shekhen. A bluff, but a calculated one. A withdrawal that severe might have killed the younger Stamatin twin outright-- he does nothing but drink, since his beloved tower fell.”   
  
Dankovsky swallows a defensive rejoinder about Peter’s genius. “And you confirmed the murderer wasn’t a would-be-assassin, but rather a lowly twyre thief?”   
  
Fyordorov looks away with a shrug. “I told Miss Tycheek his name and washed my hands of it. It wasn’t the case I was assigned to solve. Not to mention that executing a man from murder of three of the Kin might have been seen as picking sides, and made the rest of my interviews harder to solicit.”   
  
“You could never be accused of overscrupulousness in your pursuit of answers.”   
  
“He killed three people for a handful of herbs. He got what was due to him. And I got what was due to me.” Fyordorov has all the vicious conviction that Inquisitor Kahr ought to. “Tell me what you have, Doctor. You could start with the slides you were examining.”   
  
Dankovsky sits up, if only a fraction. Holden Fyordorov might be useful yet. “The killer is looking for a means of immortality. There was an alchemist who was experimenting with herbal extracts and the metal compounds from the mine. I’m operating on a theory of displacement of life. The poison causes fish cells that live on after death, at the expense of the surrounding cells.”    
  
“Immortality. I see. Is this related to Simon Kain?” Fyordorov asks thoughtfully.   
  
“Related inasmuch as the killer was trying to figure out Simon Kain’s secrets, I suspect.”   
  
“How long  _ did _ Simon Kain live for?”

“Your interviews weren’t entirely comprehensive, after all?” Dankovsky needles.   
  
“I know what people told me,” Holden replies a little hastily. “One hundred and fifty seven years old, which seemed to be contradicted by the age of his twin. You went there to study the man. How long did he live for?”   
  
“I never got to study him in vivo, as you well know. The situation was more-- more complicated than simple chronology would suggest.”   
  
Fyordorov blinks thoughtfully.   
  
Daniil finds himself enjoying the attentive conversational partner in spite of himself. “By all accounts, there was someone going by the name Simon Kain more than a hundred years ago. Was it the same man? Perhaps some of the same man.”   
  
“Could Kain have acquired this elixir? Kept it secret, even from family?” Fyordorov asks.   
  
“I don’t know the specifics of his longevity. It concerned identity and time, chiefly. The superstructures of human society-- the possibility of many disparate entities supporting a consciousness. All very recherché compared to something as tangible as an immortalizing ambrosia. Not to mention that his projects were, by all accounts, ongoing. He wasn’t playing like a man with a full house.”   
  
“He did seem to have unfinished business,” Fyordorov agrees. He’s looking past Dankovsky now, finger tapping on his jaw. “Burakh said old patterns and fresh ink. But if this killer is unnatural in one regard, what’s to say they haven’t lived to an unnatural age?”   
  
Dankovsky bolts upright on his bed, and then clutches at his shoulder. Between terse, hurt exhales he manages to get out: “You think isn’t repetition of a rite, a ritual. The colonial murders and this recent series of kills, all the same perpetrator.”   
  
“It’s not ...steppe tradition, as far as I can tell, but it seems ritualistic to me. This is someone killing with precision, with purpose. Something happened that triggered this spree. Perhaps they started to suspect their own mortality. We see that, with killers. Stress, and then the bodies start showing up.”   
  
“You thought this was the work of a haruspex, spreading entrails to answer questions. A person facing mortality after a hundred years would have desperate questions indeed.” Daniil runs a hand over his eyes, then the abrasive dark stubble filling in on his cheeks. “They spoke to Rubin first. I didn’t think anything of it; in fact, I discounted Rubin’s involvement as simply incidental-- Burakh always seems to be at the center of these things. But if they wanted answers about Simon Kain, they would go to Rubin. The steppe folk knew Rubin conducted the autopsy, and our killer is either Kin, or at least familiar enough with steppe language and culture to integrate easily.”   
  
Fyordorov is pacing back-and-forth now, as if he’s the one in a cage. His injured rib seems forgotten. “What are the other ingredients to this elixir?”   
  
“I hadn’t figured that out yet. And now I’m awaiting my execution.”

“If we know what they need to collect, we can preempt their moves, and apprehend them,” Holden says, still pacing.   
  
_ If we know what they need to collect, we have defeated death itself,  _ Dankovsky thinks. “...they’d accept your authority, you know. If you told the guards I was to be released.”   
  
Fyordorov stops. “Agent Tench wouldn’t appreciate that new headache.”   
  
“You’ll see me dead to avoid hurting your partner’s feelings? You government operatives are a soft bunch, aren’t you?”   
  
“What’s wrong with your room here?” Holden asks coyly.   
  
The Bachelor looks about the tiny cell contemptuously. “Other than being home of the great god Pain?” Dankovsky quotes, though he’s not quite sure from where. He smiles insincerely at the Behaviorist. “It is insufficient as a research facility. I need my things.”   
  
“I don’t trust you, Dankovsky. I like you, but I don’t trust you. I don’t think you’re given to, uh, ‘overscrupulousness’, either,” Fyordorov says in a friendly tone. “Not to mention your accusation that Burakh was treating you as a potential traitor. That, to me, hints at a guilty conscience.”   
  
Dankovsky wishes, momentarily, that he’d shot the smug, eavesdropping bastard.   
  
Fyordorov steps closer to the iron bars, his less bandaged left hand surreptitiously resting over the heavy door lock. “I’ll look into the ingredients of the elixir. Thank you for all your help.” He draws back the bandaged fingers, something red in their wake.   
  
“If you deprive me of options other than treachery, your suspicion is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Dankovsky huffs. He leans against the door, swipes the pill box straight into his palm. He retreats into his cell to examine it. Sulfate of morphine. The labelling is in a simplified, bold typeface-- not the sort he sees in the hospital. Battlefield supplies. The Behaviorist seems to have no concerns about suicide attempts. Or at least, not while spinning bewitching theories of immortality. Daniil stashes the pills in the deepest pocket of his dark fur coat and feels markedly less murderous. “You stole these from the military base? You could get in a lot of trouble, Agent,” he murmurs.   
  
“That seems highly unlikely.  _ I _ don’t have a substantiated habit of stealing narcotics. I’m certain blame will land elsewhere.”


	10. Chapter 10

The Bachelor waits for Fyordorov to be gone before he gulps down a pill, even though the man already considers him a junkie. So, someone reported that he’d stolen morphine on at least one occasion from the hospital. Someone sympathetic, to allow the theft to go unreported but to the Behaviorists. Did any of the nurses like him? That seems highly unlikely. Could it have reached the administrators and stopped there? Perhaps his unusually long work hours saved him-- or at least, the uncompensated overtime.   
  
As he waits for the morphine to set in, he wonders what else the Behaviorists know about him, what other intimacy and privacy might have been violated via those damned interviews. His upbringing? That seems almost certain. His research at Thanatica? Maybe bureaucratic roadblocks on that front. His personal life? No salacious details there. There’s comfort, now, in his Icarian ruin. Anyone he might have once termed a close friend (or at least a valuable colleague) is estranged. He can’t think of any other glaring social vulnerabilities. Father, dead. Mother, remarried but often abroad. At least, she was before the war. He hasn’t been on speaking terms with her for years, nor his decade-younger half-sisters.   
  
All alone in the torpor of drugged painlessness, he realizes he had no thought for family when there was a loaded gun aimed at him. He didn’t think about them during the outbreak, either. Probably why the townsfolk were so alien to him, each tethered to their family like an overworked barge-hauler. 

Fyordorov is clearly a formidable manipulator, well aware of Dankovsky’s true weak point: eternal life. That, he’d thought of plenty both during the Sand Pest, and when Tench seemed so close to shooting him dead. Begrudgingly, Daniil confesses to himself a secondary concern in Artemy Burakh’s fate, which the agent is also coolly exploiting. There’s something both admirable and reprehensible about Fyordorov’s willingness to mar himself with blackmail and double-dealing. Nothing like the sclerotic, conservative authorities that Daniil has for so long loathed.   
  
Of course, none of this makes Fyordorov a trustworthy ally.    
  
After the Sand Pest, Daniil found himself believing that the cruel moral lesson fate sought to teach was that he couldn’t accomplish his goals alone. That he should have cooperated with Artemy-- and even, God forgive him, Clara. And now, lesson learned, fate has stolen his chance to do any better. It would be funny, if it were a tragic parable about an insufferable, hubristic caricature. Instead, it is happening to him.   
  
There’s only one person within grasping distance to cooperate with. Fyordorov. That is scarcely more palatable than the bobbing goat gristle in the ghastly prison stew. The pain in his shoulder is back.   
  
Daniil decides the dosage on the pills is vastly overestimated-- maybe the morphine is cut with starch to save the manufacturer money-- and so takes another.

_ “Dankovsky.” _   
  
He’s dreaming of a great bull trampling forward, cracking apart the rough mud in great scabbed lumps and clods. A spearman desperately slashing at its flank. He knows, he knows, that there’s something terrible below. Something that should stay buried.   
  
_“Dankovsky.”_ Again. Brightness like a burning metal.   
  
This time, Daniil blinks. He must have fallen asleep sitting, because he’s in an awkward tangle in the corner of his cell. A lamp is raised into his face and blocks out the person holding it. “Yes,” he mumbles. His lips are rubbery, and his head pulses with thoughtless interference patterns. Perhaps the stated dosage was accurate.   
  
“The General has requested you. Up.”   
  
Dankovsky tenses beneath his oversized fur coat. So, going the same way as Lilich. Maybe he should have been less glib about her execution; surely that’s what invited fate’s snide jest. He gets himself upright through a series of stiff-limbed stumbles. And then he sees the agent.   
  
By the door of the cell is Fyordorov, inscrutable in the darkness except for those constantly watching, unavoidable eyes. The window is letting in only dusk, and the lantern is harsh in his face still, but Dankovsky sees the agent dip his head into a tiny nod.   
  
Holden Fyordorov is a narcissistic control-freak who would never hand over a valuable human resource to a military investigation. This, then, must be the requested jailbreak.   
  
One of the soldiers is pulling out handcuffs, which Dankovsky winces preemptively at.   
  
“He’s been very cooperative, Private. Those won’t be necessary,” says the darkness outside the cell.   
  
After a pregnant pause, the cuffs are put away.   
  
Dankovsky had told the agent that bluster would work, but that too was bluster. The escape plan doesn’t seem so ironclad now. Daniil surrenders the height from his posture he usually fights constantly for, and tries to make himself seem dull and unthreatening and academic. He follows past the cowering prisoners in equally small cells, down a steep, cut-stone staircase, and onto the street. Two soldiers smoke by the jail’s entrance. Across, he recognizes the subterranean town hall. 

Fyordorov is marching sharply away from that, and back towards the town’s center. The snow has been shovelled from the streets, and what remains is grubby and slickly compacted. Daniil is unsteady enough from the morphine that keeping pace feels perilous, but he doesn’t want to lag behind with the soldiers either. Overhead, a feeble lavender sunset is failing into starless black.   
  
Fyordorov doesn’t look back to ensure he’s being followed. He turns, and turns again, walking ever faster. Midnight already lurks ready in the overhangs of wooden roofs and the nooks of plaster facades. Daniil tries to peer into that subtly writhing darkness, the setting and unsetting of patterns built from the endless possibility of shadow. Something is wrong about the agent. No fur coat. No hat. Gloves, not bandages.   
  
Daniil stops walking. Fyodorov does too, then slowly turns around. It is the agent, and it isn’t. An impression, but an imperfect one. Only his lips are in the light. There’s pin-drop silence aside from Daniil’s unsteady breathing.    
  
“Did you kill him? The man whose face you’re wearing?” the Bachelor asks. He’d tried to keep the accusation unsentimental and uncowed, but he hears childish timidity.   
  
He-- they-- shake their head. “I don’t want more of them coming in and cluttering up the town. Besides, those three seem more awake than the rest. Their eyes are half-open, like a child stirring from sleep. To spill them would pain me.” The voice is too steady for Fyordorov, too velvet.   
  
An unnatural ethic indeed. “...so you don’t kill for this… disguise, then.”   
  
There’s a brief frown, the mild-tempered frustration that might be levelled at an obstinate, naive child. “No. I do it to see the Lines that Death follows.”   
  
“...are you going to kill me?”   
  
“I would never. You’re the one that Death itself fears. The great conqueror. I need you, Doctor. And they would have hanged you come dawn. I know what would have been.”   
  
It seems foolish to protest otherwise, on only Agent Fyordorov’s word. “You freed me so that I may continue my research?”   
  
The young man’s face nods. “Decay, entropy, scarcity, these are our shared enemies. And that most mortal enemy.”   
  
“Mortality,” Daniil finishes, reluctantly charmed by the paronomasia. “Perhaps not all enemy. A jilted lover? You can’t seem to avoid death, wherever you go. You seek it out.”   
  
He-- they-- laugh in a rich, satisfied way. “That’s a very romantic sentiment to hear from you, Bachelor. No, you know as well as I do: fas est et ab hoste doceri.”   
  
Latin, not that steppe language.  _ They know to whom they speak, then. Clever personalization-- a good salesman. _ “You said you’d regret killing the people trying to catch you. The others, you don’t regret?”   
  
“Taking a life is always a tragedy. But existence is a gradient. The death of the mindless, the undifferentiated-- I see no reason I should mourn them more or less than slain cattle. There are those that live, and those that act as if they are alive.” They walk away, expecting to be followed.   
  
The alleyway is tight and couched all about with darkness. The Bachelor wonders if he’s following along to his own gruesome murder, that Tench and Fyordorov and Kahr will scrutinize come morn. He could attack first; he’d have only his fists, and he’d be fighting wounded and drugged, but he’s loath to go as quietly as the other victims. He could run-- where, he’s not entirely sure, given that any patrolling soldiers are likely to drag him back to his cell. He’s devising escape routes and not watching his feet, and he skids a little rounding the corner. Not ice. Rough, crunching shapes scattered over the scraped pavement.   
  
“Birdseed,” says the murderer from ahead. “The children leave it out.”   
  
“...a game?”   
  
“There used to be birds here, before the mine. Grouse. They were considered lucky.”   
  
“Sailors consider seabirds lucky, don’t they? They’ve survived,” Dankovsky wonders aloud, side-stepping the rest of the hopeless offering. “The children could make do.”   
  
“They could. ...the mountain spring has always carried poison into the ocean. It goes into the fish, and then into the ocean birds. They’re accustomed to it, they resist it; they die slow. It was never so unsettled as to pollute the land too, not until they started digging and drilling.”   
  
“And species that have never been exposed have no resistance to speak of,” Daniil pieces together, thinking of the myths that kept local tribes from living in the bay. A helpful fantasy, like miasma theory leading to better sanitation. Even some of the emergent superstitions about the Pest had been helpful; if folk tales of a skulking steppe poisoner keeps you from drinking from contaminated water supplies, it is a life owed to fiction.

“Creatures come to survive their environment, but the scale is generational, evolutionary. We’re still on the first generation of humans.” They say it with a certainty reserved for the studied.

“You’ve researched the metallic properties, then? If you tell me what you’ve already ascertained, perhaps I can--”   
  
A shake of the head. “You figure this out. I know it. I’ve given you your freedom, and you’ll use it well.”   
  
Daniil stops thinking about fleeing. He’s in the throes of an irrepressible admiration-- he doesn’t think even he has this dedication to the eradication of death. More a thanatologist than him; more a diviner than Artemy; more a shapeshifter than Clara. He watches his feet as he sways through the birdseed and gravel and snow. “Do you think--” he begins to address nobody, and realizes his error as his gaze flickers up. 

The alleyway is empty.   
  
Daniil puts his back to a cold stone wall and wonders if he’s lost his mind.   
  
There’s barely a whimper of wind from the ocean, and the air is as endlessly translucent as fine crystal in a corner pawn shop. The snowy mountain seems to go up endlessly into the sky and the cliff-perched cabins glimmer with gaslights.   
  
The Behaviorists have his research, but his mundane belongings are probably still in the cabin. In raids back in the Capital, everything not nailed down would end up in the pockets of the men in suits. Tench and Kahr don’t seem the sticky-fingered sort; they wouldn’t have confiscated the food, the clothing, the morphine he hid in the false bottom of his suitcase so Burakh couldn’t appropriate it for medical treatment of anyone down in town. Of course, there’s a risk that the Behaviorists scraped together the manpower to surveil the cabin, or the newly arrived General stationed a soldier at the door-- but if he waits until his break-out is discovered, that risk will become a wretched certainty. The jailors are no doubt already gossiping, second-guessing. The opportunity will be gone in the wind.   
  
He doesn’t see what choice he has in the matter, anyway; if he finds some dark alley to cower in, he’ll have successfully starved in secret. He needs food, fresh water. A place to sleep eventually, but sustenance immediately.   
  
The sheer hillside above is in the death throes of the evening, those last sickly violets and indigos playing upon the snow and not upon the jutting of stone. Boulders stand out sharp and discrete as stained cells on a slide. But between it all, there’s a glint of artificial light running down the funicular track.   
  
It seems a miracle, though an uninspiring one. But far preferable to the trudge uphill. He hurries between the tangle of alleys and bright-painted townhouses, stopping to search every trashcan for anything he could barter. He only needs one half ticket to get to that cabin, and then he can sell or trade away his belongings for the next meal. He sifts through rotting fishheads with his uninjured arm for a couple of lost hooks, wearing his survival drive like blinders. If he sees no further, the calamity won’t cripple him.    
  
His path from garbage to garbage eventually gets him to the platform (giving a wide berth to the bulbous stone statue) and there the miracle’s gilding wears thin. The funicular’s repairs reveal themselves for what they are: hasty and ugly. One of the funicular cars is halfway up the track and not illuminated at all, perhaps unusable. The other, approaching, is crumpled and bent. Green paint is gouged away from the front, and every window looks broken, though a light still shines within.   
  
The thin cord that ran up and down the mountain is gone. Instead, lengths of repurposed chain have been strung together into a struggling, unwieldy mishmash. The funicular’s descent is now accompanied by an ungodly clanking and grating. Daniil shudders as it pulls up to the station, trying to peer inside for potential barterers. He’ll trade the three remaining morphine pills as a last resort only.   
  
There are two seated townsfolk, but there’s a much more familiar face up against the glassless window.    
  
The Changeling disembarks and comes to peer up at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says in her unconcerned drawl.   
  
“I hope not.”   
  
“They set you free?”   
  
Dankovsky tries to make sense of the last half hour. “Something like that. I could use a spare ticket.”   
  
“You always collect on debts so urgently?” she asks belligerently, but produces a loose handful of blue paper. She extends one cut stub to him.   
  
He grasps it with the same creaky caution that his injuries necessitate, moving like a beginner’s marionette.   
  
“You were shot, right? I can’t heal you. I was treating the injured. They posted soldiers around, so our Haruspex can’t help them any more. Heaven forbid a wanted man should do good deeds.”   
  
“Never without a ready excuse, Changel--” he gets most of the nickname out before it sticks in his craw. “Were you on the bridge? Trying to solve the crime with your, erm, intuition?”   
  
“At your cabin, actually. Wanted to see if there was any food left after the search.”   
  
“...and?”   
  
She shrugs.   
  
“Dammit, girl, hand it over.”   
  
No hint of guilt. She has the steely nerves of an oft-accused thief.   
  
“I’ll starve,” Dankovsky tells her, bitterly. “They took everything: what little money I had, and anything I could trade.”   
  
She grouchily passes across the cold weight-- a can of meat.   
  
“I’ve already eaten the rest,” she tells him without apology. “I wouldn’t have gone all the way there if I wasn’t really hungry.”   
  
“I thought you had a meal ticket in the Inquisitor. Not providing as well as the Saburovs did?”   
  
She bares her teeth a little, like a smile. But not that much like a smile.   
  
“You didn’t see anyone guarding the place?” Daniil follows up.   
  
She shakes her head. “There’s a preoccupation with politics, luckily for you. General Salva wants to make the investigation an official military inquest. Bad news for the suits.”   
  
Daniil wonders if that’s a nickname--an odd one, in Latin-- or simply a foreign surname that has survived the nationalistic readjustment that comes during wartime. That nickname would bode ill; salvation and annihilation are interchangeable, as far as the army is concerned. “And  _ you _ were privy to those negotiations?”   
  
“Secondhand news.”   
  
“Don’t linger close enough to learn firsthand. The Inquisitor wants to know who killed Aglaya Lilich. Or at least, who gave the order. There’s no meal worth subjecting yourself to such a volatile line of inquiry,” he advises, keeping his voice low. “Especially not with a warship in harbour. Some questions have no good answers.”   
  
“I’m being cautious, Danko. You’re the fool who got arrested.”

It’s too factual to be much of an insult. Trusting Fyordorov was very stupid. “Your friend didn’t speak with Khan and Capella, I take it?” He already knows the answer from her demeanour. He realises he forgot to inject derision into the suggestion that the dead may be contacted. There is too much strangeness afoot to wholeheartedly disbelieve anything.   
  
Clara frowns. “She went to the junkyard. She has some notion that she can talk to the dead without hurting herself. She thinks she needs to get rid of the statues. Or make them talk. It’s complicated.”   
  
Dankovsky is pulled back to Fyordorov’s strategies, or perhaps to the prospect of a death-ending elixir. “The shaman, would he know about local herbs?”   
  
“Local herbs? Danko, nothing grows here any more.”   
  
“...any more?” he asks, running his hand down his face. The mine, again. A fingertip finds the split lip again, a nail working at the scab. “Dammit.”   
  
He’s surprised by the small, wire-tendoned hand on his shoulder. Her lashes flutter closed, the sliver of visible forehead beneath her hat scoring intensely.   
  
It may be a placebo, or some spike of metabolizing morphine sulphate in his gut, but the day old bullet wound feels more like a graze from a childish tumble.   
  
“It’s all I can--” the Changeling starts.   
  
“Thank you,” Dankovsky intercedes awkwardly. He brushes past, to check the chain up close before he entrusts his fate to it. His hand slips beneath his fur, worming beneath the bandage to check there’s still torn, stitched flesh there.   
  
Clara follows him towards the stationary funicular. “The chain looks more solid, now, doesn’t it? But uglier.”   
  
“Never was there a faith prettily rebuilt,” Dankovsky says dryly.   
  
She scoffs. “You can pretend to know how all our material universe functions, for all I care, but I’ll draw a line at you masquerading as an expert in  _ faith _ .”   
  
The bickering feels well-worn, like the handle of a favoured bone saw. But his familial, partially-crafted retort is lost like warmth to a draft. He can’t look away from the ruddy ocean-rust on the repurposed chains that are bolted together. The connecting bolt shines bright between dull corrosion. An unblemished alloy. Impervious. “What about underwater organisms?” he murmurs. “Seaweed isn’t technically a plant, let alone a herb, but these people aren’t educated. It would have evolved to be resilient to the toxicity--”

“The car is departing,” interrupts a reedy voice. An inexperienced looking teenager now stands in the driver’s compartment, though he’s bolstered by the uniform, the cap.   
  
Dankovsky curses and hurries to the funicular’s door.   
  
“If I see the blind man, I’ll ask him,” Clara calls after him. “But Burakh is who you want.”   
  
Dankovsky almost asks about Artemy, but cuts himself off. He hands over his ticket with his head bowed, paranoid despite Fyordorov’s insinuation that the arrest was hushed up, then slips into the back of the dented funicular car. One of the benches is empty, the other crushed and unusable. With the glass all shattered, there’s nothing to stop the night pouring poisonously inside. He wraps his fur coat tighter and huddles into it.   
  
Somehow, the noticeboard survived, or was perhaps re-fixed after the accident. The increasingly familiar wanted poster of Artemy Burakh only serves to remind Dankovsky that he has no idea where the Haruspex is.    
  
Burakh might be handing himself over, or worse, trying to orchestrate a break-out. He accosted Fyordorov, and the guilt that drove him to such stupidity is unlikely forgotten. _ Is that paranoia or conceit, to worry what Burakh would do to save me? _   
  
Dankovsky frowns disapprovingly at the artwork. “Don’t do anything stupid, Haruspex,” he says, under his breath.   
  
As if in reply, there is a mountain-rending explosion above.


End file.
